Don’t you ever wish that you could talk to the drivers in the vehicles in the immediate area? Maybe you want to warn them about a speed trap, tell them about a danger on the road, or just have a voice to talk to during a lonely solo road trip. The technology to do this has existed for the better part of a century, but nowadays it is largely relegated to a niche. The Citizens Band radio revolutionized communications. Now, I’m willing to bet that some of our youngest readers have never even heard of this before.
Back when I was a kid, we “youngins” had a fun way to pass the time on a long trip. We’d grab the microphones of the Citizens Band (CB) radios in our parents’ vehicles and blast out our little squeaky voices into the airwaves. Usually, the recipients of our shenanigans would be truck drivers, and they were often happy to join in on the banter. Sometimes, we kids didn’t even have to say anything, and we just listened to truckers talking to each other. We’d learn some trucker slang and maybe even a few creative swear words along the way.
The CB radio seemed like a device that every car should have had. These were the days before the smartphone, so you didn’t have Google Maps or Waze to warn you about speed traps and hazards. But you did have a friendly voice crackling through your speaker, warning you of a crash ahead. Full dresser touring motorcycles even had CB radios, opening up a whole world of communications decades before helmet comms became a thing.
Despite this, the CB radio has fallen into obscurity. I cannot think of a single new consumer car or truck sold in America that even has the option to be equipped with a CB radio from the factory. I’ve even noticed that the used cars that I buy have fewer and fewer CB radios than before. I have a CB radio in my garage at home, but the only time I ever mount it into a vehicle is when I’m going on a Gambler 500 rally to communicate with other vehicles. By the way, if you have a Gambler 500 rally happening in your town and you have a CB radio, tune to channel 7 and enjoy the chatter.
Anyway, what happened? How did this once revolutionary technology fall by the wayside?
Airwaves For All
The brief nationwide fame and continued use of the Citizens Band radio happened only because of one Irving “Al” Gross. He was born in 1918, and he wasn’t even 10 years old before becoming obsessed with radios.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lemelson-MIT Program explains how Gross made his mark so early in life:
It began in 1927, when Gross was just nine years old, traveling aboard a Great Lakes steamer with his family. While exploring the ship, he came upon the radio operator’s cabin and was immediately intrigued by the radio equipment and crackling noises of the telegraph signals. Gross became hooked on wireless communications, which he foresaw as a vehicle for personal communications.
By 1938, Gross had developed and tested a small portable high-frequency radio with two-way communications features. Gross’s device, which he dubbed a “walkie-talkie,” caught the attention of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (now the Central Intelligence Agency), which recruited him to develop a two-way, air-to-ground radio system for covert use by troops behind enemy lines. These mobile “walkie-talkies” made it possible for the military to conduct a high level of surveillance throughout World War II.
After the war, he set up Gross Electronics Inc. to make 11-ounce walkie-talkie sets for private use. Gross continued to invent mobile personal communications devices, securing 12 patents and developing the discriminatory circuitry that made possible personal pocket paging systems as well as the forerunner of the cell phone and cordless phone.
It’s because of these advancements that Gross is often called the “founding father” of wireless communications.
After World War II, the Federal Communications Commission allocated a set of radio frequencies for public and personal use. Gross was at the forefront of what would become known as the Citizens Band radio, which operated on the Citizens Band Radio Service. Gross started the Citizens Radio Corporation in the late 1940s to develop smaller portable radios.
Early CB radios operated on the 460–470 MHz UHF band, but on September 11, 1958, the FCC created Class D, which designated 23 channels on 27 MHz for use by CB radio operators. Later, as CB radio gained traction, this was expanded to 40 channels across 26.965 to 27.405 MHz.
CB radio was a revolutionary invention. Now, just about anyone could have easy communication with someone else, usually situated no more than a few miles away. Despite that, CB radio didn’t exactly catch on at first. As Ellis County React Emergency Radio Communications writes, the Citizens Radio Corporation sold over 100,000 radios in the early days, mostly to farmers and the Coast Guard. Other buyers of CB radios included enthusiasts looking for an alternative to traditional amateur radio. By the 1960s, a large number of tradesmen and truckers had also adopted CB radios for short-range communications.
The ascension of CB radio was hampered in its early years by the high cost of radio equipment and the relatively low range of early units. CB radio operators also needed to have a license in the early days, though that’s not the case anymore.
Trucking And A Little Rebellion
The meteoric rise of the CB radio happened in the 1970s, and most of what made CB popular actually had nothing to do with the radio format itself.
The 1970s often come up in discussions about major forks in automotive history. By now, just about every car enthusiast can tell you that the United States was hammered by multiple oil crises in the decade in addition to fuel shortages, changing emissions regulations, and what we now call the ‘Malaise Era.’ But it wasn’t all emissions equipment-choked V8s, goofy [Editor’s Note: But effective! – JT] bumpers, and aggressive downsizing. America was also going through a deep trough thanks to a weakened economy, double-digit unemployment, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. You couldn’t even drive fast because of the then-new nationwide 55 mile per hour speed limit. Two nickels, that’s all you got.
As KRCU Public Radio writes, there were two major catalysts to the rise of the CB radio’s popularity. The first was that the advancement of solid-state electronics technology made CB radios much smaller and cheaper. Major retailers began slinging them to anyone willing to buy one. Soon, you were able to buy portable CB radios from RadioShack and walkie-talkie-style CB radios from Sears.
The second catalyst was the trucking industry. During the fuel crisis, truckers used CB radios to inform each other about where they could find stations that both had fuel and weren’t charging a fortune for it.
Then came the anti-authority twist. Understandably, trust in the government was low and the CB radio was used as a small form of rebellion. CB radio was controlled by the people, and it could be used against the government. Truckers informed any motorist they could about the presence of the Smokey Bear, or a state trooper, to save people from getting tickets. In case you’re curious, the reason why state troopers were called Bears was because their hats resembled the hat worn by the famed bear that tries to convince people to stop setting forests on fire.
In a way, CB radios became a part of what was then America’s counterculture movement, and the truckers who protected drivers on the road became legends. Suddenly, more people wanted in on this sensation, and a whole community and language were formed around the CB radio.
Everyone had a seemingly nonsensical CB radio alias (or “handle”) and an entire code was spoken over the airwaves. As KRCU Public Radio notes, you might have even heard someone saying that “There’s a Kojak with a Kodak at 111.” That’s a reference to Kojak, the police drama, and what would have been Exit 111 on that highway. It’s code to watch out for a speed trap in that area.
America’s CB radio fever pitch hit its peak after the 1975 hit ‘Convoy‘ by C.W. McCall. Pop culture ran with the CB radio fad and soon, Americans would find CB radios in the pages of magazines and books. Those sitting down in front of a screen got to see radios getting heavy use in The Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit. KRCU Public Radio notes that people even bought graphic tees with trucker CB radio lingo on them. The 1970s were a period when truckers were often seen as heroes, and that amplified the popularity of CB radio even more.
The radio station further notes that, along with the pop culture, Americans used CB radio to find connections with like-minded people to help them get through the rough 1970s. Everyone of all races, creeds, genders, religious identities, sexual identities, and more found some sort of home in CB radio communities. Remember, there was no Facebook or Instagram back then. So, if you wanted to share your day, you did it by physically someone, often on your CB radio. CB became so popular that it became a factory option in cars.
The Fall Of The Citizens Band
If this was so great, what happened? As Photojournalist Scott Loftesness writes, what made CB radio so great was also its downfall. CB radios got so cheap that anyone could afford them, and while there was CB radio etiquette, there really wasn’t anything enforcing it.
Some 25 million CB radios were sold between 1974 and 1977 alone. CB radios were so popular that they were a huge profit driver at electronics shops like RadioShack. Put that number against America’s population back then and you’ll realize that about 20 percent of the nation’s adults owned a CB radio. Eventually, this led to the airwaves being choked up by everyone talking at once and stepping on each other.
The CB radio also fell to the same kind of unfortunate circumstance that happens to almost anything that gets “too” popular. It attracted people who ruined the fun by spewing hate and profanity over the airwaves. There was nothing really stopping these people from being awful human beings, either, so if you listened to a CB radio in the late 1970s there was a chance you’d be blasted by hard racism or worse.
[Editor’s Note: Sounds kind of like another very public communications network I can think of. – JT]
Other people ran afoul of CB radio rules. As the Christian Science Monitor reported in 1983, the FCC had to deal with CB radio operators boosting transmitters’ power over the 5-watt limit. Others got their radios to operate outside of the Citizens Band. Both issues resulted in interference with devices outside of the Citizens Band. The FCC still required people to have CB radio licenses during this time, and found that countless people operating CBs in cars and trucks just didn’t have licenses.
A decline in CB radio usage followed. Casual users found the radios just not fun to use anymore. Meanwhile, the FCC faced budget cuts, which led to the end of the CB radio licensing system. As the 1970s became the 1980s, the CB radio trend began fading away, with only certain groups continuing to use them, including truckers and emergency services.
As for everyone else, they had largely moved on, especially as the cellular phone rose in popularity. I still have a Cobra CB radio gathering dust in my garage, only dusted off for Gambler 500 rallies. Be sure to check out this RadioShack ad before you go:
Thankfully, CB radio never truly died. Hobbyists and many truckers still use them, and as I noted earlier, you’ll still find CB radios heavily used in motorsport. You can still buy them for dirt-cheap in big box stores and online. But CB radio will likely remain a niche forever.
It’s a shame that such an important technological development has been relegated to such uses, but that’s the march of time.
The days of people in random two cars shooting trucker lingo at each other are largely gone, but you can still have fun with CB radios. The next time you take a road trip with a bunch of friends, forget the smartphones. Hook up some CB radios and chat with each other the old-school way.
Hat tip to Andrew Martin!
I had cb’s in all of my early cars as did all my friends. As you say, it was a craze for 4-5 years. We all lost interest at the tail end of HS when we discovered early Atari, commodore, radio shack and apple computers, games and BBS’s. The comments are correct, the early internet was for the most part a very civil place. Not so much anymore.
My Grandpa used to have a handheld Cobra CB that he hooked up to a magnetic CB antenna he’d mount on the Chevy Cavalier before any long road trip. I remember driving to Minneapolis from Milwaukee getting weather and traffic updates along with some funny jokes and comments coming across. My Grandpa never keyed up the mic, just listened in.
It saved our asses one time, driving near Eau Claire a nasty storm came in. We stopped at a McDonald’s and had lunch while a crazy storm came through and took out the power, Grandma and Grandpa were happy to be inside the store than out on the road!
When we got our driver’s licenses in the late 90s my friends and I got CB radios so we could chat and drive. About a year later Nokia flooded the market with cheap cell phones and the need for them went away.
My dad had a white on white leather 1976 Chrysler New Yorker Coupe. It had fine blue pinstripes, a 440 V8, and a factory A/M, F/M, CB, Cassette radio.
Twenty feet of 1970s luxury perfection.
had a CB walkie (and an ESN cloner bagphone) for my bicycle in early 90s Ohio.. mostly to screw with folk, as CB was mostly a cesspit of hate and ignorance by that time. I installed one in my 240 wagon for a cross country trip in 2023, and with the notable exception of warning me about a pile-up in South Dakota, it was still a cesspit of hate and ignorance. it got removed after the trip. that being said, i miss it for what it could have been. 10-10.
A lot of truckers are on sideband now.
Maybe check and see what’s current.
I had an idiot across the street running a kilowatt on lower CB channels and bleeding into ALL nearby electronics.
Complete jerk and the FCC seemed useless with him.
He had proofed his antenna cable against having a pin run though it to ground it out.
So I finally got my car rig in the garage and set up the ground plane to aim right down the throat of his massive antenna.
He could talk to Michigan, but I was pegging every meter he had when I keyed up.
He lost his mind, but never figured out what I was doing.
Finally drove him off the lower channels and the bleed over stopped.
Still satisfying!
If I find a trail-riding group that is still CB, I have a cheap handheld that does the trick. Most of us are GMRS channel 16 (4×4, get it?). Motorola makes a 50 watt GMRS that is intended for enormous farms, but also makes the mountains a little bit flatter, especially with a low-gain antenna.
I recognize CBs for their contribution, though.
Had a Kraco De Luxe 23 channel as my first. Bought it from a second hand store for cheap because 40 channel CBs were becoming standard. It was a fancier version with the plastic chrome trim and wood grain wrap. Later had a Cobra 40 channel, but it wasn’t nearly as good. Even later were Cobra handheld vehicle models that were utter poop.
My father had a Midland and that thing was really good. My uncle “Diamond Jim” had some other higher end brand with an illegal signal booster, but he only turned it on when he was way out traveling through nowhere. He also had a HAM radio in his main travel vehicle and could talk to people much further away. That was more useful in the middle of nothing NM or AZ.
They came in really useful for bear tracking and when traveling in multiple vehicles in the pre cell phone days.
A friend and I picked up a couple of these at a swap meet and put them in our first trucks when we were 16 in 2006. Learned quite a bit of funny lingo when cruising around at night!
Back in the early 80s, our neighbour was a CB aficionado. We discovered this because my dad’s hifi used to pick up his conversations due to how powerful his rig was.
A lot of this was repeated with the early Internet, especially in Usenet groups. There were certain norms that you were expected to follow. Every August/September there was a new wave of users as kids started college and were online for the first time. They learned proper netiquette through observation and community pressure, and all was good. The AOL connected their subscribers to the Internet, and the sheer number of people completely overwhelmed the capacity of the community to properly socialize the new folks to the existing in norms. This has been labeled as “the September that never ended” or “Eternal September.”
But back in the automotive radio world, Subaru used to have weather band on their factory head units. Seems like a good idea for any vehicle, but especially so for the outdoorsy adventure image of Subaru.
Back in the early 80’s, Friday afternoons in the spring I was with my brother as we would be heading towards the Lincoln Tunnel in NYC. We’d be on his Radio Shack CB on channel 19 getting the traffic reports from the gathered locals and other drivers suffering the same fate as we headed to the “hole in the wall”. One regular had the handle “Bicycle Base”, who would provide regular updates on the backup heading into the “hole in the wall”. One Friday afternoon there was no more Bicycle Base, apparently, he had a heart attack the previous week. That was probably our last regular Friday afternoon. making that trip, so I never found out if Bicycle Base recovered or not. I still wonder to this day.
I was fascinated with CB radios as a kid in the 90s, way past CB’s heyday. I even wrote a report on the history of CB radios for some school assignment. My dad had one in his truck and I would try to talk to locals, but living close to Mexico where higher wattage is allowed my transmissions often got stomped on.
One night when I was in high school my friends and I were out driving around doing who knows what when we started having an argument on the CB with some guy who was threatening to kick our asses. He told us to meet him at a local park and stupidly my two friends and I did so. I remember walking around the park carrying The Club anti-theft lock as protection when we saw a homeless guy asking for some change. We gave him some but the supposed tough guy on the CB was nowhere to be found.
We went back to the car and shortly after we heard on the radio “Thanks for the change, boys.” At that moment we realized we seriously could have been hurt or killed by this random dude, and from that point on we curtailed our shit talking on the CB.
Dad not only put CB radios in the car & truck we had when I was a kid – He had a CB radio in the house.
He’d listen to the weather reports, etc before going out in those cold Michigan winters.
It’s a good thing we had it when driving cross country from MI to CA in summer 1977 too – otherwise Dad would have never known in his truck that Mom had a blowout from her Firestone 500 tires in her Mercury.
Both times.
When I was a little kid my dad handed me the CB and I started talking with some trucker and he asked me what my handle was and I had no idea what that meant so I asked me dad and he told me, “just tell him ‘Inchworm'”. So if you were a trucker driving through CA at some point in 1980 talking with some random kid named ‘Inchworm’ and are reading this now, Hello.
GMRS or go home
CB is trash technology today but super cool for its time. It’s trying to make a minor comeback for at least one of the reasons that it died in the first place – overuse. Right now GMRS is the new CB. It technically requires a license to operate, but no one does and its crowded to all hell in any kind of build up area and damn near useless. CB is used in vehicle group comms because its – as cheap as GMRS, doesn’t require a license, and very short range. GMRS has removable antennas and high power (for license holders) and its really easy to pick up stray signals with a good antenna and step on other people. and no, “privacy channels” aren’t a thing to solve this.
Another factor in CB popularity was that during its height the sun cycle conditions were optimal for skip propagation in the ionosphere. i.e. you could bounce your signal really really far.
CB tech is finally catching up that it might be worth a look at again – SSB and FM are both modes that can make the faults of the CB signal smaller and fewer people will be on those modes.
I was recently on a trip where the communication was split. Some had only GMRS, some had GMRS and CB, some had GMRS/HAM. We settled on GMRS and the CB people in the group all decided it was time to ditch CB and move. I’m trying to get them to the HAM side, which largely sidesteps the mass of idiots problems through hardcore gatekeeping (both in license requirements and curmudgeonly hams) which…as awful as it sounds…is really a good thing for the continued usefulness of the amateur bands. Ham is where its at if you still want the fun of chit chat. Trucker talk on CB is all either pirate stations boosting WAY beyond the limit, or pretty crude…you aren’t missing out it seems.
I can talk up and down Utah and into 3 other states along I-15 through repeaters and have had some pretty nifty conversations as I’ve traveled. Got good beta on areas from locals and even caught up with a friend of my grandpa who helped him build a cabin I still enjoy.
Car tag.
Or, “Cops and Robbers”. CB’s were built for car tag. It’s something anyone with a license can do today. Here are the general rules we had as teenagers in the 90’s:
We played this regularly. Anyone can still play this as adults.
One other thing you didn’t mention I was hoping you would was the rules. I always thought you would be arrested for swearing, so we never did. Would have liked to see you run through the CB rules of etiquette.
This sounds amazing.
In ham radio we have a variation called a fox hunt. The fox was a ham operator who would go and hide within some boundary, such as somewhere within the town limits. After a head start to go hide, various teams, the “hounds”, would employ some form of direction finding to locate the fox. The fox was to regularly transmit so that the hounds could zero in. The fox was not allowed to move, so to keep it interesting, the fox could employ various, but legal, means of deception, such as varying transmit power levels, using a directional antenna to false the signal, etc.
I well remember CB popularity as a child of the 70s and 80s. In rural Michigan, it was still widely used well into the late 90s, and may still be in farm country. The advantage, unlike FRS/GMRS handhelds, is that a good antenna can significantly improve the signal quality and range.
Besides the influx of, well, obnoxious humans who shouldn’t ever haven’t been handed a microphone during the boom, the other problem was the escalating war of output power with (illegal) linear amplifiers and 10-meter gear sold as CB equipment without the power limit for the 11-meter CB bands (or easily modifiable to defeat the output limit.) Eventually too many loudmouths with way too much TX power just overwhelmed the airwaves.
At this point in the US, FCC enforcement of CB power limit rules is next to nonexistent unless somebody is consistently causing problems — and even then, it may take years before a field office has the time and money to do anything about it.
That said, while there’s no need for running 100-watt to full kilowatt amplifiers in CB service, truckers running modified 10-meter radios with more than the 4-watt limit have often had a point, particularly in mountain regions where a weak signal is quickly blocked or subjected to overwhelming multipath distortion. It’s a problem that was just never adequately addressed and probably never will, leading to an ongoing underground of higher-output CB and modified 10-meter radios.
Dammit, Mercedes! Get outta my head! Just this past weekend something had reminded me about CBs and I was thinking back to when my mom’s side of the family all got them installed and we took a couple of multi-car road trips around Texas.
Inexplicably in my town circa 1986, long after it had fallen out of popular favor, CB radio had something of a renaissance among us teens cruising around town. I mean it got huge, virtually everyone suddenly got a unit and was chatting all the time. Where we were meeting, who wanted to race who, where the cops were. Ours wasn’t a big town but it was fascinating to see. Someone even typed up and circulated a cheat sheet with all the handles and the real names they were associated with. I was one of the few that didn’t put a unit in my Firebird but I definitely looked into prices. Most of the time I was chatting via friends’ cars. Cutlass. Seemed like it was always a Cutlass.
Anyway, I’m surprised you didn’t mention that factory-installed CB units were offered in myriad domestic car models during this time. As a brochure junkie I remember seeing these available in everything from Corvettes to Cadillacs. I wonder how many are still in place and whether they still work.
Cool piece, Mercedes, thank you for that trip down memory lane!
I have to add a mobile kilowatt amplifier in the trunk led to some fun takeovers of church, car show and various other PA systems, I know the churches experienced some special sermons.
CB radio in the 90s:
Duck: “Yeah, breaker Pig Pen this here’s the Duck and uh, you wanna back off them hogs.”
Pig Pen: “Bababooey!!!!”
I grew up watching these tv shows and movies in the 1970s CBs were cool. I had one in my 78 rabbit that I drove the 80 miles between my girlfriends college and mine in the late 1980s. It helped find speed traps. Listening to Truckers complain about 4 wheelers was interesting. It took a while to realize it was not pick up trucks but anything not a semi truck they were bitching about.
I now use GRMS in my jeep for trail rides with my off road friends.
Many people in the 70s adopted a slightly risqué handle. My aunt, now a pillar of the community longtime insurance agent, went by Happy Hooker. She was into the craft thing including macrame and hook-rugs
Most heavy duty semi-trucks come equipped with a place and power for CB radios, they are still used by many distribution centers for communications.
More importantly though, Sir-Mix-A-Lot used to (and perhaps still does) run a pirate CB Radio station out of his home in Tacoma WA.