Something I remember from my CB days was that a lot of people would rig illegal amplifiers with too much power in their cars or trucks. They are still popular with truckers and people with pickup trucks. It's also great if cell phone service is down or you're in a dead zone. My cb has saved me a few times from speed traps on highways. It seemed a shame to put it back in the basement so I got a new magnetic mount antenna for it, wired a DC power outlet plug onto it, and put it in my van. I looked online to see if that model was still around and surprisingly, after 40 years, Uniden not only still makes the 510, they still look exactly the same as my '78 model. There it remained installed but unused for eleven years until I sold the RV this summer (2017) when I uninstalled and kept it when the RV went to its new owner.

In the early '80s, after I no longer had the Impala, the Uniden got put in a box in the basement and sat there until I happened to run across it in 2006 when I installed it in my motorhome. I recently ran across my old Uniden PRO510XL that I bought in 1978 and installed in my sweet '71 Impala. Cell phones and CBs are really like apples and oranges with not a lot of common ground between them. Like any fad, it ran its course and by the early '80s (well before cell phones became common) the bandwagon CB fad people had moved on to other things. It wasn't cell phones that killed off the CB craze of the late '70s.

Had it not been for that movie, they would still have never heard of it. People who say that CB is dead are the ones who only knew about it because of Burt Reynolds. Yeah, Smokey and the Bandit started a CB craze! But that died out and now it's like it always was. Only people with limited thinking believe that CB died when cellphones came out. Some use UHF and some VHF, but they all use them. Police, fire fighters, EMTs, and any company that dispatches vehicles all use radios. Radio will never ever die, no matter what fancy cellphones they come out with. I engage in conversations multiple times per week. I don't drive the highway and people are talking all the time. But, you'd be surprise - shocked even - at how much talking goes on during my daily commute. The antenna and a proper tuning/matching is 100 times more important than the CB radio itself. Most meters that measure power also measure SWR. The standing wave ratio (SWR) meter is a good alternative to using a power meter with forward and reverse power readings. When power from the radio is sent to the antenna, some of it returns back to the radio, which is called reverse power. Make sure that the reflected power is less than 3% of the forward power. If the power output is too low, use a power meter and check the output power at the antenna port on the radio, which requires an extra jumper cable to connect the meter.īecause CB radios partially rely on line of sight propagation, they work better when set up at higher elevations.īy inserting a power meter in the antenna cable, the amount of forward and reflected power can be verified. The transmit power and antenna system of the radio also need to be optimized. Weather conditions and time of day (TOD) also affect the range. To increase the CB radio range, review your radio frequency output, station location, antenna height, and antenna setup and type. Citizen’s band (CB) radio is commonly used for mobile and fixed stations.

Cb antenna booster