Whew, thanks I was wondering where you got 4 sidebands from.Pawpaw wrote:When you're putting out that much power (I was wrong, it was 10kw from an AN/TSC60 V3), even AM radios will overload.WildBill wrote:I don't remember SSB being legal for CBers back then. Maybe legal, but not very common.Pawpaw wrote:Back during the CB craze, I was stationed in Altus, OK. The obnoxious stuff made CB so bad that sometimes you couldn't talk across the street with a legal radio.JALLEN wrote:Only chumps follow rules like power and antenna limits. Put up whatever you want, no need to put yourself out to get a ham license and do it right. The American way!
30+ years ago, back when I was young and foolish, I lived in a San Diego suburb where I had a 2KW amateur station with a huge antenna array, and talked all over the world. Across a busy street was a young punk who operated his CB quite illegally. Sometimes his over powered gear interfered with me operating legally on the adjacent ham band, so one night I tuned up on his CB channel, pointed my antenna right at him, flipped on my amplifier, ran the speech processor to full tilt, and when he stopped his tirade, I clicked my microphone and said, "Hey, shut up!" He ran from his house with his clothes on fire, and I never heard him again!
Some of our radio techs tuned up their 60kw independent sideband system to channel 19 and put a 1000 hz tone on all 4 sidebands for about a minute. Apparently, they blew out the receive section on a bunch of radios.
As for CBs, the normal CB is an AM radio which transmits a carrier wave and two sidebands. A single sideband CB does not transmit a carrier and only uses one (selectable) sideband. An AM radio will pick up a SSB transmission, but it's intelligible.
Yes, SSB was legal back then. They were just more expensive.
Actually during the CB craze I established myself as an RFI "expert" at the phone company, which did me well for many years. Not only was I able to track down the sources of noise complaints quickly (and sometimes they actually were the phone company's fault) but I had the ear of a friendly FCC enforcement engineer at Varick St. and he saw to it that we got a little priority whenever the enforcement van was in our area, I even got to ride a long a couple of times and get in on the end of a situation I reported to begin with.