On Thu, 2 Aug 2012, dave wrote:

On 08/02/2012 05:37 PM, Brenda Ann wrote:
"Michael Black" wrote in message
ample.net...

Do you remember the giant sunspots during the 1960's you could see
with the naked eye? Solar flux over 200. I used to pick up WWV on 25
MHz on my cheap walkie-talkies. New Zealand used to blast in around
midnight local time just below 18 MHz. Good times.

I'm surprised you could hear 25MHz WWV on a cheap walkie talkie. Surely
band conditions opened up that you'd get all the CBers first, so they'd
wipe out WWV. The superregenerative receivers were wide band, but the
CBers were a lot more plentiful.



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In the 60's, there were relatively few CB'ers, and the ones that were
around were legal 3 watt output. The big CB boom didn't happen until
around 1971 or 72. WWV would have been what? About 50KW? At any rate, a
lot more powerful than a 3W CB.


There was a big CB boom when it was first authorized. 1961 or so. My dad put
a ground plane outside my window.

People forget, it was relative. There had been demand, there had been
dreaming, of "personal radio" for a long time. If nothing else, all those
people who wanted to be hams but didn't want to take the test.

And I gather the rules or the public knowledge was ambiguous to begin
with. I've seen early issues of Popular Electronics where CB was promoted
as a hobby band, not just peripheral things like 'build your own monitor
scope" but outright columns about DXing.

And it was no wasteland. They soon learned it was a lousy place in the
spectrum for something like that, since even without people trying to work
long distance, the long distance signals came in when conditions were
good. One reason the Heathkit Sixers (supreregen receivers with simple
transmitters, a variant of the CB version) did so well at 50Mhz was that
when the band opened up, 5watts input was more than enough for DX, even
witha lousy antenna. At 27MHz, the same thing applied, except the band
opened up even more often.

Michael