CB channels?

Agreed. Ali is a conductor it'll make a fine ground plane but it can be harder than steel to get and maintain a good electrical connection to it.

Quite I suspect there is a lot of bollocks born of ignorance floating about. The magnetic part of a mag mount obviously won't work on an ali body but the aerial part will be quite happy, well as happy as mag mounts ever ever are. An aerial properly mounted onto ali doesn't need a steel plate(*) or a bonding wire down to the steel chassis.

(*) If the ali is thin and unsupported and you are fitting a big aerial physical strength of the ali might be worth considering but fitting a bit of ali would avoid any electrolytic problems that steel would introduce.

No but you'll have a choice of PMR446 walkie-talkie sets...

Much more convient for the average famaily than a CB.

Indeed, and I originally bought PMR sets and was puzzled as to why the off-roading lot use CB instead, considering that a cheap CB setup costs close to £100 all-in, only works in the truck and needs fitting, while a reasonably decent PMR set is much cheaper, is hand-held and has voice activated headsets readily available. However, when you're the only person on a laning trip with PMR and everyone else has CB then the PMR set is largely useless! I take 2 dirt-cheap PMR sets now in case we need to talk people through a section.

I'd imagine though that PMR hand-helds have a much shorter range than CB. Not hugely relevant for a lot of laning trips but when you lose someone on the road sections when the chap at the head of the pack goes through a town and sods off at the traffic lights, PMR's range did seem too limited when I used it last. I've yet to use CB in a similar situation though.

A lot better with a mobile cb set up in a car, pmr not very good in a car and low powered. Got one of these in the middle of the roof

Been into radio for a long time and a cb is my choice possibly with a bit of help, about 100w should do it :)

-- Jon

I did half-regret not buying a handheld CB and car kit, but given that I've yet to use the PMR and I don't fancy dropping £100's worth of hand-held CB in a water-filled rut, I don't regret it that much!

There's a pidgeon-toaster in Blandford Forum many miles from me, he hangs about on hills seeing how far he can get with his 500 watts. I spoke to him from my house which is halfway across Dorset from him, so either CB has much longer range than I thought (I'm only a 4-watter) or he's got a socking great big aerial on top of his car! Mine's just a 1.5m Stinger-type base-loaded whip.

True in both particulars. My utterly cheap PMR sets will communicate over about 1 mile with no line of sight but in open country. There's not much when you're laning that needs more than that.

Have to say that CB is funkier, though. More butch, somehow :-)

You do have to be careful though, my PMR sets have dreadful audio quality, one of the reasons I held off buying CB as I couldn't understand what was being said when the engine was running. So far though my CB set (Midland 48 with a quite good noise filter) has been very clear when the signal is strong.

I stumbled across a good PMR website out there that had reviews from users on it, rating sets for things like audio quality, quite a lot of the sets are expensive though, not like my £25-for-a-pair cheapies ;-)

I did wonder if part of the charm for off-roaders was the macho image ;-) "We got ourselves a convoy!"

When I had a centre loaded thunderpole on the house it toasted most 18' Silver-Rods

It actually tuned up very nicely on some more obscure HF bands too.

20m IIRC with excellent resuts much to the disgust of the anal HF A-class ers that despised ex CBers.

Ha. :¬))

Ho yuss. I had an Avanti Sigma 4 which annoyed the HF boys something ruthless. Well, an Avanti, a Cobra 148 GTL-DX Mk2 (modded, natch) and a highly pokey little bit of Zetagi valve madness in the middle.

:¬)

While trotting back in time.... one of the first reckless things I did on getting my HF ticket was to screw up the local taxi firm that had been the pain in arse of CB in Thornbury for years by pushing 100W SSB all over "their" channels through my brand spanking new TS440 at every opportunity.

Milkman -> G0JYO over & out. Ha Ha!

I,ll go with that MILKMAN.....used to make quads from the fine wire that is wound on microwave transformers then open up on "the key" with a little assistance from a few valves and SATISFACTION !!

John G0LVU Da De Da

On or around Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:53:23 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

It's very line-of-sight - we once got quite good reception with 4W rigs over about 30 miles, hilltop to hilltop. Also, I used to sit on the seafront at Port Talbot and talk to people in north Devon. Range comes down significantly if there's scenery in the way, even with more power. 4W is going to be ample for a bunch on a laning trip though, I would think.

"Austin Shackles" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Sometimes to much range can be a problem. Even if you are not breaking any laws/rules, there are times when you will not want to advertise what you are up to.

As much as anything else, it reduces the chances of interference from strangers breaking into your chat.

Giles

The reason I've not bothered with cranking up the power (the amps are cheap after all) is that it really relies on the people you are talking to also having similar extra wellie, or you having highly sensitive aerials, neither are ideal in off-roading, but for radio nuts I can see it could be interesting. However every time someone with whopping amps is on the air all they seem to talk about is their whopping amps ;-)

I'll just turn down the RF gain, should be fine for short-range stuff when off-roading I think. I've not needed to try it yet.

Also re interference, with 80 channels and few users, is that really a problem in practice?

I used to be quite a regular CB user and it's pretty much died in the last 10-12 years. Near me in Liverpool it used to be near impossible to find an empty CB channel - now it's difficult to find someone to talk to. The only people who seem to use it are truckers, cab drivers, and people who're off roading in the middle of nowhere. Interference between those groups is unlikely.

Supposedly the rumoured CB revival is strong in the US, but mobile phone networks are supposed to be surprisingly sparse and primitive by european standards over there.

It's a shame that mobile phone push-to-talk services need a connection to the base stations and can't communicate peer-to-peer, then we could use our mobiles when off-roading even with no network coverage.

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:13:11 +0000, Austin Shackles wrote this gibberish:

I used to fit CB's to (mostly) Land Rovers doing runs down to bosnia, we ran on a quarter of a watt when in convoy, 4 watts when split-up around town and pulled out a 500w amp if/when the convoy split-up further.

quarter watt kept encounters with curious 'locals' down as if we were in a valley for example no bugger could hear us except us.

ants were usually mounted on roof racks (all vehicles had them) and the racks had good connections down to the chassis so well earthed. an antenna mounted at the front centre of the rack gave a good all-round (ish) ground-plane. and each vehicle had a disposable wire antennas that could be slung into a tree should the mood take you, that was a (more or less) 9x9 thick copper wire job.

running 500 we could reach our uk base from germany and (on usb which only mine had) could reach uk from bosnia.

happy days.

Lee - have you still got your CB in snowy now?