JS8Call is gaining popularity with European CBers

[w8nsi]

There is a thread in the Groups.IO JS8Call forum about the mode really getting hot in Europe where it is legal. From what was said, channels 24 and 25 are the ones they are centering on.

[N8YX]

Also read this on HFUnderground.

Will make for some interesting monitoring. There used to be a lot of packet radio activity on 27.540 before the FCC shut the stateside operators down. As a SysOp of a ham-radio (MSYS) gateway/BBS back in the day, it was always a challenge to keep CB-generated traffic out of the forwarding paths. A lot of EU and central/south American ops let anyone gateway through them.

[kb2vxa]

It seems like anything goes on European CB where it is a hobby band, unlike here where it still is a business and personal radio service, rules and all. We didn't strictly follow the rules, but as long as our activities such as using clean Amateur transmitters unlike nonlinear fuzz boxes didn't attract the attention of the FCC everything was cool. Some friends and I came across some scrapped thermofax machines and sensitive paper and had fun sending nasty pictures and secret messages, yes, encryption all highly illegal until we ran out of paper. Occasionally someone would ask what that "twee twee twee" sound was, "We are Krell scouts from Altair Four communicating with the mother ship." FYI Altair Four was the setting of one of the greatest Sci-Fi pictures of all time, The Forbidden Planet. Then thanks to C. W. McCall, The Pukes of Hazard et all, like the Krell, CBers destroyed each other with monsters from the id.

I remember the trouble we had keeping CB reflectors out of the Amateur packet network, I was a remote sysop for the JSARS BBS/node in central NJ that changed callsigns several times. I really had a lot of work to do with help from the sysop of our southern node trying to bring it up to speed after years running on its own after the ham who built and operated it went SK years before. We were the tail of NEBBS, North East Bulletin Board System that rapidly fell apart along with the rest of North America. When all you have left is a small slice of @WW it's the end, there's nothing anyone can do to repair the fragmented network, I resigned the position and Telnetted to a full function BBS in Australia. I had to hopscotch around, their network was in tatters, then the end came, three UK trolls chased everybody off and all that was left were the robots. That was it for me, packet is dead.

"There used to be a lot of packet radio activity on 27.540 before the FCC shut the stateside operators down."
Not just the packeteers, but the whole lot of freebanders. The spectrum between CB channel 40 and the 10M ham band is assigned to various government agencies. The crackdown was too little too late, the freebanders made legal communication impossible and those frequencies were abandoned. Before I became a paper ham I used Chicken Band as a beacon band for 10M, when Skip was in, whomever he was, all I heard was chaos.
"Will make for some interesting monitoring."
There was a time all you could hear was "hash, mash, and trash" from about 25.5MHz to 28.? depending on how far up truckers intruded among "the beepers". Then when sunspots were gone so was everything else, all I heard was the background hiss. Without antennas I don't know what's out there now, so I wish you luck.