[Mishmash] Whatever Happened To Heathkit?

[Fred Atkinson]

> As I recall, the Friendly Candy Company gave up on CB early
> on.  Originally, you were supposed to get a call sign issued by the
> Commission.  Then, they let you use a call that was basically your
> zip code (for all the identifying value that had.) Then they gave it
> up altogether and CB became a free-fire zone.  As for having your
> construction worked checked by a licensed tech, I somehow don't see
> that happening, even early on.

    Another name for the FCC was Uncle Charlie, although I never understood
where that name came from.  Perhaps it was some notorious person named
Charles that worked for them.

    I did some CB when I was a teenager.  The license cost twenty dollars.
It took months after you mailed in the license before you finally got it.  I
waited and waited and waited before it came.  And because I wasn't yet
eighteen, my father was the licensee, not me.  Of course, it was a station
license, not an operator's license.  Anyone in the family could operate
under that license.

    There was lawless operation.  So many people were using illegal power
that you could hear them quite well but they couldn't hear you because you
were covered by all kinds of transmissions from other stations running
illegal power (this of course assumed that you were running legal power
(five watts in, four watts out) yourself).  I couldn't make a CB call from a
mile down the road to my house because it was so bad.  People would transmit
right over the top of you because they couldn't hear you on the channel from
wherever they were operating from.

    I was working for Duke Power after I finished technical college.  I was
doing two way radio and microwave work for them.  Once, someone from the
company asked my immediate coworker to check the power on his CB.  When my
coworker returned, he was shocked.  That radio was putting out an illegal
one hundred watts.

    Shortly after I got my Second Class FCC license, a coworker at my part
time job asked me to adjust his radio so he got more power.  When I told him
it was illegal, he became very angry and told me that he knew it was
illegal.  Of course, I never touched his radio.

    While I was driving trucks a few years ago, I was appalled at the number
of shall we say women of less than desirable repute that were on the CBs
trying to make a business out of accomodating the truckers.  And the foul
language I heard on CB was absolutely shocking (I'm not talking day to day
curse words, either).

    When the Citizen's Band changed from twenty-three to forty channels, the
Citizen's banders didn't wait for the day that the additional channels were
allocated.  An engineer for Duke Power (whom I reported to) had dialed
across the new part of the citizen's band with an AM receiver to find that
the CBers were already quite dominant on those channels months before it
became legal to use them.

    One day, a CBer came into our radio shop.  He was openly bragging about
his illegal operations on CB.  He told me they were using sliders (illegal
VFOs, not crystal control as was required on Citizen's Band) to use illegal
frequencies.  They were also using illegal power.  He told me that they were
considering going onto the ten meter amateur bands with this equipment.  I
told him that would be a foolish idea as hams were technically saavy enough
to be able to identify and locate them so that the FCC could prosecute them.
I let him know I didn't approve of his operation.  I don't know if he ever
did it or not.  I never heard from this guy again.

    And many have gone on to other things.  Before Riley Hollingsworth
retired from the FCC, he was frequently writing letters warning trucking
(and other types of) companies that their drivers were operating other types
of illegal radios without proper licensing.  I was at a truck stop and there
was a driver there that was practically bragging about his illegal radio at
home and in his truck that he used to stay in touch with his family.  There
was an electronics store at that truck stop that was selling ten meter
radios (ten meters is an amateur band and requires an amateur license).  I
can't imagine ham radio operators coming to a truck stop to buy radios from
that store.  I suspect that store was illegally selling them to truck
drivers.  When I got to a computer a few weeks later, I sent Riley an email
telling him about it.  He responded assuring me that they would look into
it.  But I never heard from him again.

    This new person that has replaced Riley (Laura Smith) is not yet a ham,
but she has advised that she is studying for her license.  Like Riley, she
is also a lawyer and a season wireless investigator.  I'm hoping she is as
serious about this as Riley was.

    CB is one radio service that is seriously out of control.  And the hams
warned the FCC that this would happen before they created the service.  But
the FCC would not take them seriously when they originally created the
Citizen's Band radio service.  Since the FCC took away the eleven meter
amateur band to create CB, they just assumed that hams were saying it
because they didn't want to lose the eleven meter band and dismissed the
criticism.  It is a mistake that the FCC has since seriously regretted.

    When I was working as a radio technician for Duke, CBers from the
company would always stand over us while working to see what they could
learn from us about radio.  I often heard serious misinformation about radio
from those CBers.  One was that you have to keep that power mike cut back or
Uncle Charlie would get your for running illegal power.  The same person
also told me that the truckers antennas was used so that you wouldn't mess
up your SWR while you had a huge metallic load behind you.

    One of my classmates in technical school (he was an electrical major,
not an electronics major) told me about the sixty-nine channel CB.  He said
that with twenty-three channels of regular AM, twenty-three channels of
lower sideband, and twenty-three channels of upper sideband that this
yielded sixty-nine different channels.  We had covered this issue in our
communications circuits class just a few weeks before this.  I tried to
explain to him that his logic wasn't quite correct.  But he believed another
CBer before he believed an electronics student who was already a licensed
commercial radio technician and licensed amateur radio operator.  I also
remember a CBer at a truck stop telling one of my Duke coworkers that all of
the CBers were using power mikes because they got 'a lot more power out'.
He wouldn't believed an experienced radio technician that told him turning
up the power mike too high only distorted his audio and caused interference
to adjacent radio channels.

    I remember some of the CB jokes that hams used to make.  I guess that
some person today would call it 'politically incorrect'.  But listening to
those people on CB would lead you to believe that none of them had ever been
to high school.  My mother used to say that the Ph.Ds that worked in her
office (she worked for the South Carolina Department of Education and later
worked as a director for the University of South Carolina) sounded like they
didn't even have a high school diploma when they got on those CBs in their
cars.

    One of those jokes went somewhat like this: There was a ham radio
operator that had such a high IQ that he frequently made other ham radio
operators feel inferior because of the way he talked to them.  He went to a
psychiatrist to discuss the problem.  The doctor said that this was no
problem to fix.  He put him in a machine that was designed to run down IQ.
But while he was in the machine, the doctor got a call and got long winded.
When the doctor hung up, he suddenly realized he had left that man under the
machine for entirely too long.  When he returned, the meter was showing the
ham's IQ was almost non-existant.  When he asked the ham if he was all
right, the ham replied, "Ten-four good buddy".

    There were some other ones, too.  One that I created went like this: Did
you know that according to the FCC definition of the word modulation that
all of the carriers on the Citizen's Band were unmodulated?  The FCC
definition of the word modulation is the process by which you put the
intelligence on the carrier.

    I laid that one on our friend Bill in Monetta while operating on two
meters back in the late seventies.  Bill got quite a chuckle out of it, as
did some others.

    Regards,




Fred