Jere Lull wrote in news:jerelull-17F4D3.01260926122006
@news.bellatlantic.net:

Come on, Jere....Fess up! NO CBer ever ran 5 watts!


Well, you found one. License was in Dad's name, and I was more than a
little "respectful" of him. This was when the FCC *did* investigate, at
least in our area.

Still have a SSB CB in the closet. That was sorta interesting.


In 1957, both when I got my ham license and at the start of 27 Mhz CB
operations, I got 20W1956. I built the Knight Kit CB-1, which was nothing
more than a bunch of parts and a Bud box when it came. You had to wind
your own coils around the provided forms, even. CB was new. Noone had
parts..(c; It was a regenerative receiver that hissed away madly all the
time and a simple 1-tube transmitter with only 1 channel. I used to lay
crystals out on a piece of paper with the channel numbers on it so I could
rapidly swap crystals when one of the rich CBers said, "Go to Channel 8" on
his fancy Gonset or Globe mobile that had from 3 to 9 channels. Oh, how I
dreamed of owning one of those radios...(c;

The sunspot cycle was the highest it had been in 50 years. With only a
vertical dipole strung between two 2x4s nailed up a tree, you could easily
work Florida to California from upstate NY on 4 watts, all anyone had.

Heath came out with a little 4-transistor regen walkie talkie kit really
cheap. It was a 3" x 3" box about 9" tall. The front of it had a big
knob, only one, that was on-off-volume and a red pushbutton on the side for
PTT. It was only one channel, too, Channel 11. Everyone was on Channel 11
because that's what most radios came with. Every kid in my school wanted
one. Walkies were unlicensed under 100mw. Burgess sold a lot of large 9V
transistor batteries because of me. I got so I could build one in an hour
without opening the instructions....(c; I must have made 50 of them. The
little Heath soon replaced our 1-wire Morse Code network we'd used for many
years across the town...buzzers and batteries...car batteries.

My dad finally came around, much later, and got one of those new fangled CB
calls we all scoffed at...rookies. He was KLP-9928. Oh, the shame of
having a rookie call in the house...(c;

CB was great fun, but my life was ham radio. A bunch of old hams, who used
to hang out in Jerry Hess' surplus electronic junk shop around an old coal-
fired potbelly stove hooked us boys. Tiring of us hogging their HF
stations almost every night, they decided the only way to get rid of the
nuisances was to get them their own ham licenses and stations. Jerry had
tons of parts from WW2 and Korea to donate. All the boys got 5Y3 and 6V6
Novice transmitters and loaner receivers. Mine was a Hallicrafters Sky
Buddy. AM soon followed. I got a Heath DX-100 AM monster kit for
Christmas and passed General. I was 13. The DX-100 also worked 100W of AM
on CB....(c;

Name withheld - 5th Amendment Invoked....