David G. Nagel wrote:
Slow Code wrote:
When CW is gone, CB'ers will get the other bands too.

SC

Actually what the FCC did was to take the 11 meter band and create the
General Radio Service Class C and Class D.
Class C was limited to only a few channels (6) limited to control and
paging. Class D was farmed out as 23 channels with only AM modulation
and a max. of 5 watts power input to the finals. This was later
modified to 40 channels and 4 watts input.

Wasn't it 4 watts output?

The classic CB'er came just prior to the increase to 40 channels.

Dave N
KBH1602 (very expired)

Some more facts:

11 meters was never a ham band by international treaty. FCC allowed
hams to use it on a shared basis with Industrial, Scientific and
Medical users after WW2. This was done in part as a sort of
compensation for hams' loss of 160 meters to LORAN after WW2.

The Citizens' Radio Service was created by FCC in the late 1940s. The
original Class A and Class B services were on UHF - right where FRS
and GMRS are now.

The problem was that, in those days, the UHF radios that performed well
were big, heavy, expensive, power hungry and complex. Simple UHF sets
that were small, light, inexpensive and simple didn't perform too well.


The Citizen's Radio service had so few takers at the end of 10 years
that FCC created Class C and Class D, at 27 MHz. Low power channelized
sets for 27 MHz could be made small and inexpensive even with the
technology of the late 1950s.

FCC could take the band away from hams because it wasn't a ham band by
treaty anyway. They also argued that the creation of the 15 meter ham
band in 1954, and the gradual return of 160 to hams, meant that 11
meters wasn't critical to ham radio.

Add to that the fact that 11 meters wasn't the most-popular ham band
anyway. Many popular rigs of the time didn't even cover the band. It
wasn't harmonically related to the other HF/MF ham bands of the era,
and in many areas it was full of noise from ISM users like diathermy
machines, vacuum formers, etc. Since many other countries didn't
allocate 11 meters to hams, there wasn't as much DX to work on 11. And
the 1.7 MHz wide 10 meter band was right next door.

Of course hams didn't like losing the band, fearing that it was a
harbinger of things to come, but it wasn't. Over the intervening years,
we hams got all of 160 back, and three new HF bands at 30, 17 and 12
meters. The cb boom of the '70s came and went, and hams are still here.

73 de Jim, N2EY