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| Realistic Navajo TRC-434 CB Radio Base Station |
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This was my great-grandpa Hall's CB Radio base station. He used to use it to listen to hunters on the radio in his house74 back in the heyday of CB Radio. When he passed away, it sat in the house for nearly 15 years before I found it and put it in my Jeep. Now, at the time I was too poor to buy a proper CB radio comact enough for the Jeep, so instead I mounted this big thing on the passenger side of the center console, it worked well. I recently removed it and bought a proper CB unit that's much smaller. And now this enters my collection!
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| This thing is about the size of a big, thick textbook. |
This was made to sit on a table and be connected to a large outdoor mast antenna. Since the 50's truckers have used Citizens Band Radios installed in their trucks to communicate on the road, to talk about traffic and hidden police, and just to keep each other company. During the 70s, CB Radios became a popular way for people to keep in touch with family and communicate with other drivers and people in town. Much like what cell phones are used for today, a mother could have a base station in the house and "call" her child or husband on the CB to find out where they were, or a child could call if they needed help. With cell phones and pagers becoming cheaper and more popular by the late 80s and early 90s, the CB slowly faded away, and today they are almost exclusively used by truckers.
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| Large with many controls. |
So all CB radios have about the same basic controls, a volume switch, channel selector, squelch, and most of the time an RF gain knob. There are 40 CB channels, with Channel 19 being the most common one used by truckers, and Channel 9 being reserved for emergencies. When no one is talking, there is a lot of loud static that is picked up by the radio. The squelch knob cuts off the speaker for weaker signals, you can adjust the knob for more or less static depending on where you are. Usually in the city, where there are a lot of radio signals and interference, the squelch has to be set very high, while in the country it can be set much lower where there isn't a lot of RF interference. RF gain increases the power used to broadcast and receive signals, turn it up all the way to reach as far as you can, or turn it lower to only receive close by signals, useful if there are a lot of people all talking at once.
This base station does a good job at picking up signals, and truckers can hear me well. I've used this to avoid traffic, and often the truckers are entertaining to listen to. But since it is getting old by electronic standards, I figured it would be a good idea to replace it.
As you go up in price, there are more and more features. LED displays, noise cancellation, special clarity controls, everything you can think of. Even today, there are CB enthusiasts who drop hundreds of dollars on CBs, personally I just like to have one for trips on the highway, I bought an extremely basic radio with no extras.
Since there are few people using CB radios anymore, the FCC doesn't actively enforce laws regarding CB radios, one of which is that you cannot modify a CB radio in any way, or increase the broadcast power past 4 watts. There are tutorials all over the internet that tell you how to do it anyway though. People have modified their radios to pick up and broadcast signals hundreds of miles away. You can read more on Wikipedia!
