CB Radios
Who knew that things had moved on so far since I had the old AM unit in my first car. It was a flash jobbie for its day, Uniden with a main box and all other controls remote on the hand piece, so it could be installed all tucked away out of thieves line of sight. That of course moved on with that car and I “upgraded” to a single side band AM Electrophone beast that attached solidly somewhere always in sight and was a good reliable piece of kit, shame the sound quality was so awful as to make any incoming message almost impossible to understand. Mind you that one did make a progression through a variety of cars, actually it has even been in The Count on a previous occasion many years ago, well it was in there till I figured out it was for some reason providing a constant drain on the battery even when it was turned off. AM was the beast to have though, cheap and accessible, UHF was the new kid on the block and was expensive and no one had the damn things
I am now looking through all the information I can, thanks to Mr Google, and there sure seems to be quite a few changes in what is around, new legislations and laws and a whole lot of new channels available on UHF CB’s, now with 80 channels. Poor old AM seems to have taken the back seat, old tech and whilst still available, doesn’t seem to be popular any more like it once was. Seems you have to remember what all the channels are used for as otherwise you could get yourself into a bit of trouble. Oh and how’s that the manufactures have been given a stay of introduction so that they can go all out to try and sell the old 40 channel units to poor unsuspecting folk that may not have checked into things too carefully! Not that hard to research though so perhaps people need to pay attention a little.
So here I am now searching through the ACMA (Australian Media and Communication Authority) website looking at the new regulations and laws and at the ExplorOz and UHF CB Australia web sites to see what they recommend and what the new regulations actually mean in normal person language. I guess it all comes down to how much and what features you want on a unit, same as anything else a person wants to buy, and while there doesn’t appear to be that many manufacturers of UHF CB radios there seems to be a heck of a lot of models made by each of them. I am currently leaning towards the Oricom UHF180, though that is fairly much price driven.
The research continues…….
And the winner is:
another Uniden - UH7700NB, tiny, takes next to no room, easy to fit and comes with an aerial, so we'll see how it goes.
