Illegal CB Radio Operators Hunted Down & Fined!

[Funkteon]

Considering the amount of radio heads in this comment thread, can anybody tell me if using a Midland X-Talker T61 is illegal in Australia?

[ItsaRomethingeveryday]

a bunch of us scattered around Minneapolis used to use cb radio to communicate due to most of us not having a landline, and cellphones did not exist, none of us ever had any run ins with the FCC, the only time the FCC ever became involved was when "Et" as he called himself was modulating with a very illegally high output and bled over the pa system in the Metrodome during a vikings game

[rondellschuyler]

I was in the Navy in the mid 1990s in Norfolk Virginia. I knew many CB operators. Loud mouth, 212, Ronnie 72, lady Godiva, lady midnight, pearl doctor and Cajun to name a few. We had fox hunt get togethers and breakfast meet and greets. It was a good time. I went by the handle Big Red. Thanks to everyone who got me into radio. I still love it today. I operate sideband mostly today and go by 426 Big Red. Cheers !

[jay-em]

Never underestimate an engineer with an unlimited budget.

[msvirtual]

I grew up in Long Beach CA. My grandpa was a HAM operator and I took up CB. It was our Facebook in the 80's. I had a base station with an Astro-Beam on a rotor, and an extremely 10-8 mobile rig in my Chevy Van. We enjoyed the K-40 magna-mounts back then. Met my first wife on my CB. Basically lived in my van on top of Signal Hill between the oil pumps and shot DX all over the world. Tried getting back into it, as I still have all of my original equipment, but the CB and upper/lower freqs are nothing but Spanish speaking. They have no toleration for clean audio. They run full mod swings to complete distortion that bleeds 8-10 channels in either direction. 20 minutes of trying to do anything that resembles communications ends up in a migraine headache, so it all got boxed back up. At least I have my memories. It was the Wild West back then and those memories make me smile.

[zenithcoinsandhobbies]

My grandpa was a ham operator back in the day and tells stories of some CBers he knew that did this back in the 70s. He also has some interesting stories about tracing a few pirate stations on FM and short wave. Another story I've heard is that our local electrical inspector for the town was busted by the FCC back in the 70s for broadcasting without a license. He was broadcasting, as the guy in Blues Brothers said: "both kinds of music: country AND western!"

[redneckhippiefreak]

LOL My buddy ran a 1000 watts out of his truck..The day he hooked it up I was taking a lazy Sunday nap. I woke up to a muffled voice somewhere in the house..."Hello!" HellllO, Heelloo!" It seemed to be coming from the Bedroom...and the kitchen, and the living room ...I walked from room to room and couldn't nail it down.. I actually thought someone had gotten stuck under the house or something.. As I was walking out the backdoor I heard the Microwave say "Hellllo!" and a split second later I heard the echo from my neighbors house... noticed it was EVRY radio and device that had a speaker.. The Tvs, Clock radios, Even my doorbell speaker was saying "Helllo!".. I walked over to his house and he was in the cab looking at the watt meter as he screamed .. "Helllo...Helllo!" into the mic. It would light up his interior lights and tail light every time he keyed on. XP All he ever did with it was sit on the beach when it rained or if he was watching a fishing pole.. He could sit on the beach and skip that thing nearly 3200 miles out to sea and 2000 miles over land. We are in the Southern tip of NC and he was reaching people in Nevada, and Alberta as well as Suriname and French Giana. He never did get busted but he damn sure busted the air when he punched the button. XP

[Randy.E.R]

I too was one of those high power transmitters in the 1990s. With little more than a ten year old base station from JC Penney, a 400 watt linear amplifier and a 40 foot antenna.

This was in the sparsely populated area of the Mojave desert where every weekend a group of us called the Saturday Night Sidebanders got on the air to talk to each other. Think of it as an early version of a chat group.

You might be surprised what ended it for us. This was the early 1990s and the vast Mojave Desert where illegal meth labs were frequently raided. With each bust, deputies were finding CB radios with amplifiers. It seems this was the new way of meth dealers to talk to one another. I guess their paranoia made them think their landlines were being wire-tapped, so they started using CB radios.

None of us wanted to get caught up in that mess, the Saturday Night Sidebanders called it quits

[thestonerguy]

This brought back some latent nightmares. In the late 60's everyone in town (I was living in the New England area at the time) used handles. Most illegal stuff had to do with antenna height above the roof (no way you'd get away with a 60 ft. tower), linear amps (not all that powerful, most of 'em were in the 75-100w range) or non-approved frequencies. At the time of the 23 channel synthesis radios we had access to channels 22a and 22b. The most popular channels were 2, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16 (ssb), and 22. The adults mostly hung out below ch.10 (which at that time was used by truckers), while the teenagers-young adults were on everything above 10 (except ch.14 where the 100mw kids hung out). There were quite a few "scares" during that period, and if you turned your CB on and only heard folks using their legal callsigns, it was a good bet that "Uncle Charlie" (i.e. the FCC) was in town. It only took 1 or 2 phone calls to verify that the dreaded plain white FCC van was in the area, busting people left and right. Infractions ranged from the smallest (not using a station-to-station channel, abiding the callsign ID time or chitchat type conversations) up to the most severe - Linears and/or antennas too high. All it took was an FCC bust or two, and the whole town became very silent, with limited transmissions using callsigns. Back then, an FCC van seemed to have a directional loop on it, and it's whereabouts were relayed via hardwire (phones). I recall one instance where I noticed only "legal" activity when I powered my base station up and the phone rang. It was a friend of mine who said an FCC van was parked near my house. I dropped to the floor, crept to the window, and peeked out one blade of the window shade to find a white van with a directional loop parked along the curb, in front of the church across the street. Recalling my conversations over the air the previous night, I figured my goose was cooked and when my Dad found out... well, I shudder still at what may have happened. It turned out their attention was focused up the street, about 1/4 mile from me, where they busted one of my neighbors who had a too-tall free standing tower, a linear, and a modified Tram Titan II. I don't remember his fine, but it was over $1k and under $5k. After a few days, the "all clear" signal was relayed by phone and we'd resume our normal communications. And now, I have to get a towel to wipe the stream of cold sweat running down my back...

[harryjohnson]

In 1982 in the UK I was a pirate using the AM band on a Cobra 148dx with a Star-duster aerial using the handle Rough Rider breaking on channel 14. Back then, for a very brief moment in time, CB radio in the UK was huge but it died a death when it all became legal 😁

[trainliker]

Way back when (circa 1969) I was a Navy electronics technician stationed on the USS Norton Sound (AVM-1) moored in Port Hueneme, CA. One of the radiomen had gotten bit by the CB bug which was all the rage at the time. He asked for a little help, and one evening we set him up on one of our two AN/URC-32 500-watt (as I recall) transceivers. He had no trouble reaching who he wanted and one guy responded, "You must be right next door to me." The next morning, we see a big white FCC truck pull up on the pier in front of the ship. We figured it might be for us and the mechanical counter tuning display on the AN/URC-32 was still showing something like 27.135. I scurried up to the compartment with the transceivers and changed the frequency setting and even changed the power amp tuning. We never heard a thing about it. And a couple of times on Midway Island while working at the transmitter site we helped out the local Ham club (they had a nice Collins S Line setup) by putting up a 10kW transmitter on a very nice rotatable log periodic antenna. They were in the Air Force hanger but an audio line came from them to our patch panel at the transmitter site. Not much risk of an FCC truck driving to Midway Island.

[saddam]

The introduction of the President HR 2510 and the Ranger RCI 2950 in the early 90's really made the CB out band commonplace. These super CB's were so common, everybody had one. Where I live in Canada, the government generally left you alone as long as you were not running lots of power and causing TV interference. I used a TVI filter and never used a "boot" so I never had a problem.

[wilsongarland]

In 1960 I talked on a legal CB radio mounted in my car to a ship in the Gulf of Mexico while I was on top of the downtown tunnel bridge headed to Portsmouth. We had met months earlier when the ship was tied up next to the tunnel bridge. He confirmed he got me clear and then I entered the tunnel.

[danfarris]

I was the wire solderer for my dad and all his radio buddies. Presidents, Yazous and modified Cobra 140’s were the radios of choice in the 80’s. They would turn on their “footwarmers” and talk all over the world. They had a list of frequencies that they would use and knew which ones not to use. Putting up an antennae was like an Amish barn raising in those days with everyone coming to help. I often wonder how those guys would have taken to the internet had they lived that long.

[scrappyny]

I too was one of the CB regulars back in the early 90's on Long Island. I would say a small group of us about 10 or so would be on every night. One of the people I met on CB is still my friend to this day. It was great back then it was the cell phone or internet of the day. Many of us had elaborate rigs including beam antennas. I didnt get that elaborate just a Wilson 1000 antenna and a HR2510 modified to broadcast on CB and peaked to about 35 watts. One of the games we liked playing was one of us would take a car and hide somewhere in our town and others would drive around tracking the signal strength to find us. Me and a friend got creative and hid on the top of a parking garage at the train station. After a while of people looking one goes "Im coming up there." Fun times back then!

[LibertyEver]

Amateur radio operators do a lot of the spectrum policing in the US, particularly in the ham bands where non-hams are operating illegally, and with poor practices - way too much power, signal splatter across the spectrum, etc. I knew some hams back in the mid 70s who didn't bother reporting illegal CB operators to the FCC. They'd triangulate the signal and locate the station, in a more cost effective version of the tax funded
FCC method depicted in this video. When the station was off, they'd push a stick pin through the coax, snip off the ends of the pin, and pinch the coax jacket to hide the pin holes. The next time the illegal 2000 watts went down the coax, the final drive tubes in the linear amp would blow. It was difficult for CB operators to locate the problem. It took the fun right out of their illegal radio operation.

They responded more quickly and harshly to anyone operating illegally in the ham bands with profanity, broadcasting music, whistling, or malicious interference.

There don't seem to be as many illegal radio operators these days. I think these misanthropic sociopaths have mostly moved on to being internet trolls where they can aggravate more people.

[baronedipiemonte]

Another fun & informative production. The U.S. still has plenty of freebanders. Since then the FCC has shut down many local field engineering offices.

[TheREALJosephTurner]

Now that analog TV is dead in the States, I don't understand why the FCC didn't bump up the legal limit for CB when they added FM privileges. Had they bumped up the wattage, you would have seen the more legitimate manufacturers bringing cleaner amplifiers to the market, which likely would have weeded out most of the dirty amps currently on the market. It might have also breathed new life into CB- at least moreso than just the addition of FM.

[mspi]

Loving these latest videos, really interesting and informative. Love the depth of knowledge you find on the topics.

[codyway]

Yet today, you can provide the fcc with and exact address of a guy like Mike Sherman who spews 5000 watts on cb channel 19 and they do nothing. Multiple ham clubs across the country have reported this guy over the years. He has single handedly pissed off every truck driver in the US, rendering their cbs useless to monitor traffic conditions.