Early electronic social networks part one: CB radios
It’s easy to forget some of the old social networks since everyone today thinks the internet is ubiquitous. There was a time when electronic social networks didn’t happen on a computer monitor, but over the air.
CB radios were so popular that their use was injected into many movies and TV shows at the time. In the mid-to-late 1970′s, CB radios were the Twitter of their time, connecting people in a local area, but people on the fringes of one local area would be the center of another, creating somewhat of a chain of conversations across the airwaves.
There were two kinds of CB radio users: drivers and home bases. The drivers would use CB radios to pass the time, or report on traffic. Truckers were known to use CB radios all the time, and still do to this day. Home bases were the people like myself who would talk to people in their local area. Generally, it would be people that I knew from school, but there were some people that lived in surrounding areas that I got to talk to.
The social aspect didn’t happen until I got older. Some of us that used CB radios would get together once in a while, either by car or bike, just to hang out and pass the time in person. It was having a meetup long before people melded the word “tweet” in front of it. Sometimes we’d play a game of “find my house” by using the signal strength to figure out where we lived, and then just hang out in the driveway once we were found. It was all good since we all knew each other from school anyway.
I don’t know how I came across the CB radio we had, but it wasn’t one with AC power. In order to make it work, I had to use a car battery, and attached the radio directly to it. The antenna I got on the roof by throwing a tennis ball with rope around it between wires that were connected to the house, and pulled the antenna so that it was above the roofline. Moving the antenna that hight easily got me another 6-10 miles out of my transmissions.
Nobody used their real name when using a CB radio, either. Privacy was the same then as it is now, and we all used nicknames or “handles” to talk to each other. To be honest, I can’t even remember what mine was. I think I have an audio cassette of a night of talking on CB once. I’ll have to see if I can dig it up. As far as privacy goes, some radios had a scrambling mechanism on them to prevent people from listening in on a conversation, so long as the listener didn’t have the same equipment, and then they’d be able to eavesdrop.
I haven’t used a CB radio in at least 15 years and I think it was just to check traffic while driving. Now we have GPS and live traffic feeds. I haven’t felt compelled to turn on my CB radio to be social since high school. CB radios are still sold to this day, and are still used by truckers. I don’t know if people are using them at home like they used to.
If you still use a CB radio, or have a story to tell about them, leave us a note in the comments. Going 10-100.
Category: Social Media, Technology
In 1977 at the height of the CB craze I was 15, and I was full blown into it. It wasn’t the land of southern accents and trucker talk like everyone makes it out to be. It was as normal as Twitter is today. Different types of people gathered on different channels and modes (AM, SSB) at different times. Many geeks modified their radios and could be found on channels not available on a normal CB.
Many of these groups got together in RL. The person that got me into World of Warcraft is someone I met on the CB back then and he is still a great friend today.
You know, I didn’t even think about CB modifications, but it makes sense. Were there certain radios that were more modifiable than others, like today’s cell phones?
With everyone on the internet nowadays, I don’t even know if anyone uses CBs in my area anymore.
In the early days, all CBs were modifiable. When the frequencies were crystal controlled, all you needed to do was switch out a legal crystal for an illegal one – which certain electronic stores would have “under the counter”.
Later when ICs became common, it was actually easier to get more channels simply by grounding the right pins on the PLL (Phase Locked Loop) chip. I had radios with something like 200 channels (normal at the time was 40).
Manufacturers curbed the modding of radios later by making PLL chips that could not be changed in this way… and that’s about when the popularity of CBs declined.
I guess I should add that the modification of radios was a great learning experience for many people, and while illegal on the CB band, it is perfectly acceptable in the Ham Radio community, where many of the more technical CBers ended up. Me included. I’ll have to upload some photos!