On 10/21/09 06:00 , Bill Baka wrote:
D. Peter Maus wrote:

When I lived in St Louis, there were a couple of guys with base
stations, who pretty much signed on and parked on a channel, chatting
all night. Got to be a fairly common occurrence. ****ed off a guy in
St Charles, who had an old Collins he'd brought up to 11 Meters, and
put a Yagi up on top of a huge tower out behind his house. He had an
EchoPlex in his audio chain, and apparently a mixer with several mic
and line level sources. He was moderately entertaining for about 5
minutes, and then got very tiresome, very quickly. It took about 2
years for someone to finally take him out. And it wasn't FCC. They
were clamping down elsewhere in the area. A couple of local operators
found his base, and took his tower down for him. He was removed from
the evironment shortly thereafter.

It sounds as if he were personally messing up the 10 meter band. Some
CBers had 'sliders' so they could go out of band. One screwed up, got
drunk, slid down to a government frequency and told them to get off his
channel. They found him within 24 hours and confiscated all his
electronic stuff.

The bands were VERY quiet for the longest time. And then there was a
revival after 'Convoy' came out. Truckers running 500 watt linears.
The largest I heard of was one guy claiming a kilowatt. Talk about
your redneck conference call.

Mostly they use them to alert other drivers of a cop in the bush waiting
to snag someone.
Some of the big rig drivers went 80 MPH. I don't know what a semi would
do for an actual top speed. Might even be over 100 MPH.

Some of the big Kenworths will do 120 without breathing hard.

I was on a trip through Missouri about 12 years ago, and I had my
Cobra with me. I heard a trucker with a big signal talking about a
crash involving a bridge and an 18 wheeler nearly 75 miles ahead of
me. Traffic was backed up for 30 miles and growing. I checked my
map, and made a detour. Added easily 25 miles to my trip, but saved
me a lot of grief. I saw on the news in Little Rock that night that
the bridge had been severely compromised, and both roads had been
closed by the authorities.

Were it not for that trucker I would have been stuck in that
traffic for half a day before I could have turned around.

Most of the time, yeah, they're watching for patrol cars.
Occasionally, they have important news.

Occasionally.