Learning something new on SSB

[silvereagle1]

Don't laugh this isn't the jokes and humor section but i'm gonna share a little story. I've been around the hobby for many years now but I was out of it for a little while until a few months back. Thanks to this forum and "new" radio equipment I am finding out that I really knew nothing at all about the hobby back then. In a lot of ways I'm nothing more than a old novice. Ive been re-born to the hobby. I'll give you an example of what happened today. First of all I did not know what a "coarse" clarifier was actually used for because my ssb radios 20 years ago only had the one clafier. Up until today to be honest I still had no clue!! At noon today I was talking skip with 4444 out of LA Calafirnia on his 35 dollar Mobile as he calls it on lower 38. He kept saying go down to 380 so we can get a clear channel. It took me a minute to figure out what he was meaning. I turned the coarse clarifier counter clockwise and sure nuff I tuned it from 27.385 down to 27.380 and we talked for about 5 minutes with Hardly any noise. Just one of those things I had no clue you could do after all these years and it was right in front of me all along.

[dirtyjob]

nice what 5 khz can do

[silvereagle1]

Yep, liking my galaxy a little more every day. What will I find new tomorrow?

[1 ADAM 12]

You can also use the 10kc switch if it has one...

[peterwo2e]

is great to have that type of flex. europeans love those half channels. lots of times you could call cq here also and get a responce lots of guys operate between channels. so if you ever been on channel 38lsb long enough then at one point listen for giancarlo aka 227 from italy one of the strongest station coming out of old italia. he would call cq on 38lsb and quickly qsy 5kc up to 390 finish the contact.
you never too old to learn.

[MDYoungblood]

You can also use the 10kc switch if it has one...

Adding a 10 kc switch just lets you go one channel up, down, or both depending on what mod you use, using the clarifier to go between frequencies to the zero's is a little harder to do on some radios, the clarifiers just don't have the range. Some Uniden and Cobra radios just need an inductor in the clarifier circuit, I have been looking for a mod for the Galaxy's but haven't ran across one that works.

[silvereagle1]

I notice that there is a 15 khz difference between some channels so I guess the 10 khz button comes in handy on those frequencies if you want to get away from the noise. Sound right? Or am I wrong?

[MDYoungblood]

Back in the day a 10kc switch was used to get the "A" channels on the old 23 channel radios, you would make the switch to go both up or down which gave you a few more channels/frequencies on the radio. You can look up "A" channels on the search. On the new radios (CB's) when you do a channel mod you have some skipped channels so the 10kc switch helps there. All CB frequencies end with 5kc's, ie: 27.185, (Ch 19).

3's

Greg

[7Oh7]

Great story. You or I shouldn't feel bad at all. I am in the same boat you are. Thanks for the story and thanks to the Guys at CBRT for making it possible for you to share it. I am learning new things every day and some of the guys here at CBRT help explain things at different levels from the mere mortal to the intellectual who needs to know more then turning the nob a little to clarify someones voice on SSB.

73

[dirtyjob]

I notice that there is a 15 khz difference between some channels

Each cb channel is 10 khz apart normally, as pointed out by MD there are skips of 20 khz, these are referred as "A" channels or "RC" channels they lay between 3 and 4 "26.9950" - 7 and 8 "27.0450 - 11 and 12 "27.0950" - 15 and 16 "27.1450" - 19 and 20 "27.1950"

So naturally to get to 26.9950 you would have to go to channel 3 and hit the +10khz switch.

why are these skips there? the ones i named above were designated RC channels "Radio Control Frequencies" used by paging systems, older car alarms with a paging feature and remote controls planes/toys and the like. Some of these are stil used for this purpose, if you go there you may hear beeping and wierd noises if a remote control device is close and in use there.

there was also a frequency gap between Channel 22 and Channel 23 which is now where Channels 24 and 25 are assigned now, originally the 11-meter band was for ham radio and went from 26.9600 to 27.2300 "dont quote me on the exact band plan but it's close", and a frequency for radio-controlled devices at 27.2550. The 11-meter band became CB Channels 1 to 22, and the radio control frequency became Channel 23.

[silvereagle1]

Seems like I remember remote control cars saying 27 megahertz on the box when I was a kid... So they sandwitch them in with the cb frequencies? That's something I would have never figured out... Good trivia that I bet even some of the old guys don't even know.

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Friday, 20 September 2013, 20:33 PM

Let me re-phrase that lol. Even the most experienced of hobbiest, I bet there are some that don't know this little bit of info.

[Buzzweiser]

Back in the older years the "A" channels were known by many as the "RC" channels. You could find a whole host of gadgets running their remote controls on these frequencies. Toy cars were very popular as well as some of the early garage door openers. When radio started getting real popular the garage door people had to scramble to change their remotes as many people complained about their doors going up and down frequently. It didn't take them too long to figure out the culprit.
In some area's of the world the CB frequencies are allocated to what we call the half channels, like Sweden. Their Channel 40 layout is 26.960 - 27.410. New Zealand uses 26.330 - 26.770 for theirs. These "half" channels can open a whole new window to good DX contacts if conditions are right. Many of the EU operators use them quite frequently to get away from the noise. Locally here in the USA there's a small group of dedicated users that use them as home channels. One group who I refer to as the "Boys From Oklahoma" are almost always on 27.420. There's another group from California that run 27.400. Occasionally I run across a few of the EU operators that like to run some crazy frequencies that are somewhere in between the "normals". You may here them say go to 27.53275 or something of that nature.

[19CT008]

In Europe lots of dx happens on the so called 0-channels.
I programmed all channels in 5KC steps in my Intek HR5500 radio.

73's, Bert