Air mile distances to the various locals

[Sandbagger]

The other night during the Roundup, we spoke about distances between the locals. So I dug up an old spreadsheet and updated it based on Google Earth's distance measuring tools. So here are the distances from my location to those that I know of. It's interesting just how far most of us are from each other. It's not like the old days, where the vast majority of our locals were less than 5 miles away..



CB_distances_signals_2.xls (25 KB)


Locals in the 1970's in the greater Norristown area:

CB_distances_signals.xls (33.5 KB)

[cbrown]

We were pretty rural here in the 70's. It was odd to see a house without a CB antenna, and almost every car you saw had one on it, too.

[Sandbagger]

Apr 25, 2016 8:48:58 GMT -5 cbrown said:

We were pretty rural here in the 70's. It was odd to see a house without a CB antenna, and almost every car you saw had one on it, too.

Back in the day, there were so many people on the radio that bleedover became one of the biggest issues that most of us had to deal with. When you have over 20 people within 1/2 mile (and 6 or 7 that could be measured in feet), all sorts of RF overload and intermod was the result. It was a good thing that the majority of people had not learned to clip limiters and/or run tons of power, or it would have been even worse. Many different brands of radios were compared with bleedover immunity being the top criteria which determined which rigs were decent and which were "junk". Some really nice vintage radios, that we can really enjoy running now, had really terrible bleedover problems back then, which gave them bad reputations that they otherwise didn't deserve.

[cbrown]

Power output was interesting back then. Not too many people had amplifiers, and the few that did seemed to know how to use them. I had a Browning 180 that at best would drive 60-80 watts through the two 6JG6A tubes and that was considered a lot of transmitting power at the time.

Nowadays people run 600 watts in their mobiles. We thought we we hot stuff with our two transistor Prides.

[Sandbagger]

Apr 27, 2016 9:53:24 GMT -5 cbrown said:

Power output was interesting back then. Not too many people had amplifiers, and the few that did seemed to know how to use them. I had a Browning 180 that at best would drive 60-80 watts through the two 6JG6A tubes and that was considered a lot of transmitting power at the time.

Nowadays people run 600 watts in their mobiles. We thought we we hot stuff with our two transistor Prides.

Yes, it's so true that you really need to keep all this in perspective. In our groups in the 70's, we were all so close to each other that amps weren't necessary to be heard, except for those "battle times" when someone needed to put the hammer down on "the enemy". I had the almost identical amp to your 180, in a Contex 6706, and it was good for a 2 S-unit signal jump in the distance (and "distance" back then was anything over 10 miles). Today, a 5-15 mile separation between stations in the group is normal. But no one runs barefoot either. 40 - 150 (carrier) watts is "normal" power. But while there are way fewer people on the band than there were in the 70's, the ambient noise levels have increased. It's really tough trying to operate mobile, with all the buzzing, static and other noises that seem to be in the air. Lot's of aging electrical infrastructure, combined with switching power supplies and LED signs and traffic lights are really making it rough out there. You literally have to run big power just to cover the same distances that you used to be able to do with stock power, before the noise levels drowned out your receive.