FM on 11M

[KG4CGC]

I guess all of my 23 channel SBEs and Motorola are obsolete now?????
Nope and I see no reason to get a newer CB,,,,

Get on channel 23 on Thursday nights, 8 pm. Point your antenna towards Greenville SC.

[N8YX]

Anyone hearing FM on the band yet?

I can imagine that more than a few FM-capable ham rigs will be pressed into service on 11M if things take off. It's not like many people are using them on 10M FM these days.

[kb2crk]

Get on channel 23 on Thursday nights, 8 pm. Point your antenna towards Greenville SC.

Running a vertical or a wire, I dont see myself pointing either in any direction.......

[N8YX]

Thread bump.

I'm still not hearing much FM on the vast majority of the spectrum where most CBers operate - legally or otherwise. The only regular activity I have noticed usually occurs around 27.615-625, and I suspect that's an established group - not someone dipping their toes in the water due to the rule change.

[N8YX]

And:

Running a vertical or a wire, I dont see myself pointing either in any direction.......

Run a rope and pulley system so that you can orient the rope towards a desired location (i.e., Greenville). If you make the rope 80ft long and 40ft high, you have an equivalent 80ft boom.

Using the widely available formulas for Yagi design, cut a reflector and 5-8 directors. The driven element should be of folded dipole construction (300 ohm twin lead is ideal) and can be fed with a delta or double gamma match.

All elements get insulators on each end. The top insulators are tied to the "boom rope" with smaller pieces of rope. Helps to lay the whole thing out on the ground and get the spacing correct before hoisting the boom rope.

Once the boom rope is secured, the lower insulators/ropes can be staked and tied off then the feedline routed towards the reflector side - or 90 degrees to the plane of the elements themselves.

What you'll end up with RE/DE and 7 directors is >13dBi forward gain and F/S-F/B ratios in excess of 30dB. This can exceed the performance of the old Wilson Super Laser series - even the 8x8 configuration.

If I lived in the middle of a forest with the proper complement of trees, this is exactly the antenna system I'd use on 11M. Multiple arrays pointed at the bigger population centers and interchanges. A lot less expensive than a 60-80ft stand of Rohn 55 plus the aforementioned Super Laser.

[K4PIH]

I ran some FM CB in Germany. Sounded pretty good. Also did Packet on the CB band there as well. I may still have my Euro CB in a box somewhere. Might be interesting.

[N8YX]

Also did Packet on the CB band there as well.

I got rid of the media a number of years ago but I had hard copies (disks) of megs upon megs of CB packet intercepts.

Everyone was using 27.540 at the time. Wasn't just KB-KB or PBBS stuff, either - there were full-blown F6FBB systems running on the frequency.

And therein was the rub: Many of said operators of the larger systems were also hams. And either through carelessness or deliberate intention, they didn't configure the forwarding rules properly and flooded the amateur BBS network with a considerable amount of non-ham traffic. Message traffic, 7-zip files and the like from "USA1NY" or "USA6CA", etc. showed up daily - if not at every hourly forwarding run. At the time I was running one of the largest MSYS BBSes in the state in terms of radio complement - 3 VHF, 3 HF (including a 1200 baud port on 28.195) and a modem port for remote management. My upstream forwarders and I got sick of all the non-ham traffic hitting our BBSes so we dropped a universal Kill rule into the forwarding configs.

This had mixed reactions from our user base. But if it's my license on the line and there's even the slightest question of impropriety, the stuff gets squelched.

Wasn't too long after that (1995, IIRC) that the FCC came down on the domestic CB packet operation like a ton of bricks. It pretty much dried up overnight.

It's sad that packet radio died a seemingly undeserved death. Still isn't permitted on our Class D CB allocation but KB-KB (no BBS) operation is permitted on the old MURS frequencies. Grab a RadShack 19-1210 and connect to a decent antenna, hook to a 1200 baud controller and have at it.