Breaker CB Radio Users, Today is 10-4 Good Buddy Day

Today is October 4, that's 10/4,  so why not make it "10-4 Good Buddy Day"?

Did you ever own a CB Radio?  Were you around during the CB Radio Craze in the '70's? Those were the days of the movie  "Smokey and the Bandit",  Jerry Reed's "East Bound and Down" was the theme song for the move and C.W. McCall had a novelty song called "Convoy".

I bought my first CB in either '77 OR '78. It was a little Pace Mobile that only had 20 channels, I think I paid $19.95 for it. Everybody bought the mobile radios because they could be used in the car and  in the house with a power converter.

Just unhook it from the car, take it in the house and hook it up to your power converter and home CB antenna that you have on a tall poll or in the top of a tree. My friend Herb in Booth, Alabama had his on a tower, he was serious, but a tornado blew it down one day! His CB handle was Hamhock, mine was Mudbone.

I knew that my radio wasn't very powerful as soon as I  keyed up the mic and said, "Breaker, breaker for a radio check". That's what you do when you want to check and see if your signal is getting out very far.

After asking a few times and getting no response, I knew there was a problem. My radio wasn't powerful enough or my home antenna wasn't high enough up in the air? I asked some guys with CB experience what they thought and they asked, "Have you checked your standing wave?", to which I responded, "How do you check that?"

There was a guy in town who had a radio that seemed to be very powerful. Whenever he keyed up the mic he would just whisper, and it block everybody else in town out. He sounded like a real big man. I wanted a radio like his. I just had to meet him and find out!

Another friend of mine,  Rex Luker,  knew who he was and took me to his house to meet him. I was amazed when I met him because he was a 14 year-old kid. He was talking on his Dad's radio who was an electronics repairman. They had the CB radio hooked up to a 1,000 watt amplifier, no wonder he covered everybody up, that's as much power as some commercial radio stations. Back then CB's came from the factory only pushing about 5 watts. I want mention his name, we don't want the FCC involved in this.

The movie "Smokey and the Bandit" helped kick the CB Craze into high gear. It stared Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason and Sally Field.

Watch a video clip from "Smokey and the Bandit" with theme song "East Bound and Down".

Watch the C.W. McCall - Convoy video.

Check out the 10-4 Good Buddy Blog | All About the 1970's CB Radio Craze |
Prediction: World Wide Web fad may become bigger than CB radio craze.