Top CB radio manufacturer

[N8YX]

In your opinion, which company manufactured the best or most innovative CB transceiver - and what differentiated their offerings from the rigs produced by the other concerns?

Those of you who have had the cases off a plethora of Class D sets might have noticed more than a few similarities between them. At the height of the boom, a great number of rigs were being produced with the same main boards...the ubiquitous Cybernet, the Uniden 8719/8734 and 858...together with a few others made up roughly 75% of the market. Others - Royce and CPI, to name two - manufactured their own chassis and equipped their radios' front panels with features not found on other CB radios.

So...whose stuff made that special cut? (I'll reserve my commentary for a bit later and it may surprise a few. Then again, maybe not.)

[WØTKX]

Back in the boom days I had a thing for certain Midlands and HyGains.

With E.F Johnson and SBE for fun.

[KG4CGC]

Yaesu.

[WØTKX]

YA, FT-101.

[NY3V]

Collins ;)

[KG4CGC]

Yeah, I'm sorry. I was just trying to make a joke.
I had a Spark-O-Matic 23 ch back in the day. Did pretty well with adjacent channel interference running on an all aluminum antenna.

[TESLA]

Kenwood

[N8YX]

Yaesu.

And this is precisely where I was going.

The FT-101, FR/FL-101, FT-201, FT-901 (European version) rigs merely required a crystal be plugged into a waiting socket on their XTAL assembly PCBs in the AUX spot or swapped for an existing one; usually the 10C or 10D spot. The U.S. version of the 901 required a good bit more work to get it up and running on 11 (or any other frequency range, for that matter) via the AUX position on the band switch.

And...the FT-301. In its analog guise, that rig could also be converted with a crystal addition or swap. -D variants required the same modification to the counter assembly that was necessary on the 901 for correct 27MHz frequency readout.

Why did Yaesu stop with the practice? Perhaps they saw the writing on the wall as the boom dwindled. Perhaps they didn't stop at all...the neato FT-726R apparently came from the factory ready to transceive the entire 26-30MHz range if fitted with the optional HF band module. Of course, no AM...but it didn't really matter to the crowd which bought the rigs for their SSB capabilities.

That flexibility which enabled easy conversion of many of Yaesu's mid-70s to mid-80s HF rigs works to the WARC aficionado's advantage: I've modified a good many of the different models of the period to cover at least two of the WARC bands at a time in addition to the "normal" HF allocations.

I'm very partial to my CPI stuff, like the Royce and SBE rigs ( LCB8, LCBS4, 8 ) and would love to lay my hands on an original Colt Excalibur or a TRS Challenger 1400...but there sure were a lot of Fox Tangos on the air here 'back in the day'.

[WØTKX]

Yea, a buddy of mine in H.S. got his ham license, and his dad bought the Yaesu FT-101 for "other places".

Dad called himself "Monster".

I got a Kenwood that will "do it" with an extended menu setting. I don't bother with that.

But I do use the Johnson 352 I have. It's a damn nice rig, with a decent dual conversion RX.

[N2NH]

Lafayette had a rig with two receivers and interchangeable tx/rx. Handy if you were having a conversation on Channel 5 while waiting for a friend to contact you on channel 32.

There were also the CB radios with built-in AM/FM Cassette stereos which were handy.

I was partial to Lafayettes, KnightKit/Allied and Midland myself, especially SSB units. Had a Realistic TRC-457 with all the bells and whistles. Overkill.