On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:48:31 -0400, William Warren
""w_warren_nonoise\"@comcast(William Warren).net" wrote:

William Warren wrote:

The Ranger II added Six meters in place of Eleven. It was introduced at
about the same time as the Class D citizen's band, IIRC about 1964. At
the time, Six meter AM was very popular, since technicians had full
privileges on the band, so six meters was a good "mid life kicker" and
the Ranger II was produced for several more years.

I stand corrected: according to http://www.radioing.com/museum/tx4.html,
the Ranger II was made from 1961 to 1965. I didn't know the class D
citizen's band was that old.
The creation of the CB band was at the expense of the old ham 11 meter
band (not that anyone used that band very much. The original Ranger
was able to tune 11 meters and the VFO did have calibrations there.
Eleven meters was eliminanted for ham use in the late 50's.

The Citizen's band WAS that old, I would guess +/- a couple years
around 1960. It was not initially very popular and it was intended for
some low level commercial use...companies dispatching trucks and the
like at the local level. (Remember tube radios were still the rule and
were quite bulky.) It took until the mid-1970's when cheap
transistorized transceivers were introduced for the CB band and were
adopted by over-the-road truckers. I would suspect that some popular
folk idioms such as the then-popular Country-Western song "Convoy" and
a couple of really stinkin' movies with CB featured in them captured
the imagination of ordinary folks and a lot of people who really had
utterly no need for a two way radio could get a CB to put in their car
for about $50 or so. This caused so much bedlam on the band that the
radios were functionally useless in metropolitan areas (I live in the
Washington DC/Baltimore area) and didn't serve much purpose until you
got out on the open road. It did make something of a cult though of CB
and certain folks tried to use CB in more of a ham mode including long
distance comms ("skip talking") and power escalation with (illegal)
high powered amplifiers, many the adaptation of the ten meter portion
of legitimate ham amps. This caused the nearly 30 year prohibition of
the sale of amps capable of working in the CB band which of course
meant any ham amp with ten meters on it. The little I listened to CB
(my carpool mate had one in his car) sort of revealed that the chief
purpose of the CB for most folks was to spot speed traps. "Smokey Bear
is hiding in the bush under the I-95 overpass." My car pool guy took
his out of the car after a couple months. In less populated areas
where interference wasn't so pervasive they did serve some purpose. I
recoiled in horror when my father had one in his car in my small
Wisconsin hometown and took on the personna of "Diamond Don"
Sheesh!!!! "Diamond Don, Diamond Don, got your ears up??" All my
efforts to get my dad into ham radio when I was a teen were shot to
Hell. (I wanted Dad to become a ham with the obvious ulterior motive
of financing my hobby...a 13 year old's allowance didn't go very far
when trying to buy rigs.) When dad died, I inherited his three CB
radios which I promptly donated to Goodwill. The CB boom was long over
by then and even Dad didn't have one in his car anymore. I haven't
bothered to listen up there in years.

Jon W3JT

William

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