Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
CB interferencee to tv sets in the 70s and 80s
On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 20:34:57 -0500, "Bob Campbell" wrote:
"OM" wrote in message .. . ...Yep. Had to install one of those myself on my base station because the inbred idiot living behind the house threatened to burn down my house if we bled over on his football games again. We called the cops on him after my RG-8U got cut one night in four places, but the ******* apparently used gloves because no fingerprints could be found that matched his. LOL, wow I didn't have problems like that. My neighbors would just call on the phone and ask me to stop, which I did. ....The problem was centered on the fact that Cable Channel 5 in those days was assigned two channels that swapped off, one for Waco, the other for Belton-Killeen, and both were MW relayed using some pretty ****ty equipment that was prone to odd WXI - sturm und drang didn't seem to phase it, but there was this mountain fog that would cause signal degradation and cause ghost images. One stretch of the MWR went over a man-made lake that carried heated waste water from a power plant, and the thermal convection actually played a bit havok with the MW signal when the temperature was just right - IIRC, ~55-60F. This was going on for about ten years already when CB showed up, and the Chicken Banders all got the blame for something that had long been around and understood. Adding low-pass filters usually did the trick. ....We had one jackjaw who was running massively illegal back in the Glory Days. Every night from about 8:30 to sometimes as late as midnight, he'd crank up his 1kw footwarmer, and start spinning his Moonraker 8 around looking for someone to either QSO with who was outside the 60mi limit, or for someone to complain about all the bleedover so that he could zero the beam in on him and effectively ruin his evening by going into a long 40-50 minute tirade about why eveyrone should bow down to him and simply shut up and stay off the air while he ran the channel. When the FCC was called in on him, they couldn't find his footwarmer because it was elaborately hidden in the wall with the coax placed so that when the coax was pulled, a string was also pulled to simulate a short reach of cable. The FCC chalked it up to just a "finely tuned antenna" but before they ran additional output tests the agents were recalled in the '77 downsizing, and never followed up on it. That night, the jackjaw got on and started cussing everyone out within earshot, vowing to find out who turned him into Uncle Charlie. and promising to melt their rigs with "10kw" of power which some ham was reportedly building for him. ....Needless to say, all of us nearby had had enough. One windy night, we crept to the back of his house via a creek that ran behind it, cut his guy wires. and watched as a 50mi gust bent the mast, antenna and all over his house and through the roof. As it turned out his roof wasn't ensured for damages caused by a falling mast of his own construction - he thought it was covered under the tree and phone pole clauses! - he had to not only pay for the full damage to the roof, he didn't have enough cash to rebuild the mast. Several montns later, he got diagnosed with testicular cancer, and we never heard anything more from him after that. I was running a Heathkit base station (a GW22 I think) that had 5 (count em!) channels available via the front panel switch. You could actually use any channel from 1 to 23 as long as you plugged in the correct crystals! It was built by my older brother, and I sorta "inherited" it when he got married and moved out. ....I remember the GW series quite well. They were one of the reasons the FCC imposed PLL requirements on all CBs sold after 1/1/77, to prevent crystal swapping that would produce out of band ops. OM -- ]=====================================[ ] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [ ] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [ ] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [ ]=====================================[ |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
OT...There are Crystal Sets,and then There are These Crystal Sets... | Shortwave | |||
Some Old Australian Sets | Swap | |||
Interference From TV Sets | Equipment | |||
FA AA5 Tube sets | Swap | |||
FS: PRC-77 Sets | Swap |