Re: [telecom] Little rewards get people to see truth in politically unfavorable info

While I was working as a radio technician for Duke Power Company in North Carolina] it used to amaze me as to the massive amounts of misinformation that CB users were spreading around. Mostly, it was about radio theory. I will share three of the many stories I heard.

We had stopped for lunch at a truck stop one day. One of my colleagues found somebody installing a power mike on his mobile CB unit. When he asked the fellow why he was doing that, he said that by putting more audio into the radio, he would get more power out of it.

When my colleague explained to him that this was not true, the guy replied, "Oh, no. All of the CBers are doing it. And they are getting a lot more power out.". So, my colleague gave up on trying to explain it to the guy. He was clearly hopeless.

We ran into one fellow who had actually installed the truckers' antennas on a Volkswagen Fastback. There was absolutely no way this was going to work as those two antennas have to be spaced wide enough apart to work properly. He told me that the truckers antennas 'prevented messing up your SWR (standing wave ratio) when you have a 'huge metallic load' behind you'. Another hopeless radio expert.

There was no point in sharing your expertise with them. They would always believe other CB users before they would believe experienced and well trained FCC-licensed radio technicians.

An amateur radio operator I knew told me that he was trying to help a CB user upgrade to amateur radio. At first, he thought the guy might be worthy of his effort.

When the guy told him that he was only putting out one and a quarter watts out of his CB radio because he had a quarter wave antenna (five watts times one quarter wave), he totally gave up on helping the guy.

And there are many other true stories like these. I just couldn't believe the massive amounts of misinformation they were spreading. So many of them appointed themselves radio experts.

It wasn't long after I worked as a radio technician that I totally gave up on trying to correct their misinformation. It was a lost cause.

Regards,

Fred Atkinson

Well, it's "sort of" true, at least in theory: the Class=D Citizens Radio Service, which we know as "Citizens Band," uses Amplitude Modulation, just like broadcast AM stations in the 550-1700 KHz Broadcast band.

In order to perform Amplitude Modulation (AM), the transmitter must add and subtract power from the outgoing carrier signal, and that change is done by the transmitter's modulator, which takes the microphone's signal and amplifies it to change the amount of radio-frequency power going to the antenna.

However, in most CB sets, the amplified signals from the microphones are run through a low-cost "compression" circuit called a "Clipper," which is supposed to maximize power output from the radio, but also adds a LOT of distortion, and putting more audio power into the clipper circuit just produces more distortion in the transmitted signal. The increased power from a power mic, sad to say, is usually heard as a distorted and hard-to-understand sound when it's received.

... which means, as a practical matter, that "Power" microphones only increase the ability of salesmen to brag about their paychecks at "Power" lunches.

Well, he might not have been aware of it, but that CB'er could have achieved much better results by spending the time to properly bond a single antenna's feedline to the roof of his car, which would provide a proper "Counterpoise," and dramatically increase the "Field Strengh" of the transmitted signal, and also maximize the strength of signals received from other CB sets.

[Snip]

I've commented before on the sad tragedy which is the Citizens Band, so I won't labor the point, other than to say "You're right."

Bill Horne