In the late 1970’s while I was driving for a living I started to meet a few drivers that were getting citizens band radios (CB’s) for their cabs. They were illegal imports of American radios and could only be bought on the black market. I managed to find on for sale from a friend of mine who owned a transport cafe just outside Kendal. He had a coach which he converted into a cafe for the truckers on the M6 motorway. His handle was Bacon Bob, he got me this Sharps one hander, all the controls and the channel window were on the microphone and that was all you could see because the workings could be fitted out of site. I bought a whip steel antenna, a mirror arm clamp for it and fitted it in my wagon. There were six or seven of us had cb’s at Hedges and we all had different handles or nick names. Mine was the Icebox, not very original I know but it fitted. It was great fun travelling up and down the motorways chatting with mates as they passed. If you were in a strange town many breakers would help with directions, I made lots of new friends this way. There was always the idiots or “bucket mouths” , these were breakers who insisted on swearing at everyone just to cause aggravation. I even fitted a magnetic mounted antenna on my car. It looked like something off the dodgems with the five foot aerial on top of the roof.
One afternoon I was coming south on the M6 towards the lake district from Carlisle when I heard an American accent on the cb shouting for a copy. I answered” do you copy the Icebox south bound on the M6?” “ yes I copy you Icebox, Where is the M6?.” I explained that I was south bound from Carlisle towards Liverpool. He said that he was south bound from Washington on I95. “Are you in America?” I asked. “Yes where are you?” I told him I was in England and at first he would not believe me. I said do you have any way I can prove where I am. He said send me a post card with my details on and he gave me a post box number and address to send it to. We chatted for about five or ten minutes with no breaks as we both drove. The all of a sudden his signal faded and disappeared. I got home and sent off the post card as he had requested, sure enough two weeks later I got a reply and a pack of QSL cards, these are cards that radio operators send out to prove a long distance copy or conversation. I later found out that the sun affects the upper atmosphere of the earth and when there is a lot of sun spot activity the upper atmosphere turns into a mirror for radio waves. Our signals had bounced right across the Atlantic ocean over three thousand miles.
This encouraged me to go even further in to the hobby and I bought a home base antenna which I mounted on the top of thirty feet of scaffolding pole in my back garden. I would sit up until the small hours of the night talking to local breakers and then in the dawn light go out in my car to the top of the local hill, Ashurst Beacon and try to see how far away I could copy other breakers. I would regularly have a chat with mates on the Isle of Man, North Wales, North Yorkshire, Birmingham and sometimes southern Scotland.
One Sunday morning I was up on the top of the hill and I was trying to get breakers from their homes to be able to have a chat with a few long distance breakers. Suddenly a police car drew up behind my car and two officers jumped out and came to the drivers door. I would down my window and said hello. They said could I please turn off my cb as it was interfering with a radio for greater Manchester Fire service. All morning I had been coming over the radio round Bolton and Salford as clear as bell. I apologised and closed down the network. They were interested in the set up I had and asked where they might get one. I was a bit worried becuse it was then illegal to have these sorts of radios i the UK. I said to come down to meet me later and I would see if I could get one for them. We met up when they were off duty and I put them in touch with a friend. They became real friends and had the cbs fitted in their own cars. One took the handle Black Rat and the other became Bluebottle.
Heather and I joined the local breakers club The Roger Roger club and we had many happy years with other breakers doing things for lots and lots of charities. We organised a convoy to the top of the Horseshoe pass in North Wales each Easter Sunday and we had a mass eye ball. One year four of us had our head shaved while we were up there to raise cash for a young girl from Bangor who had encephalitis. We wanted to send her and her family on a much needed holiday. She had been in and out of hospital most of her life and one of the breakers brought her to our attention when she was in Walton neurosurgical unit for treatment. Her name was Hecarty and she was just fifteen years old. We organised lots of different events to help raise money, a gala night in the local working men’s club with three or four artists. We culminated with a Sponsored Modulation. Two of my mates Fred and John and our wives would go away for a weekend to do this expedition. This was when a group set up a transmitting station as far away as possible and tried to reach as many people as a as far as possible in a continuous twenty four hour period. We decided to go up a hill in the southern lake district called Black Combe. We got all the permissions we needed , got a caravan, a generator and took a fifty foot aerial tower to five hundred metres up the hill. We started off on the Friday evening and drove up to the lakes, at about eight pm we got to the site and set up the caravan. There were six of us in a eighteen foot caravan and we did not get much sleep that night. The next morning we put up the aerial started the generator and tested the radios, everything was fine. Our wives were on kitchen duties and kept us supplied with drinks and hot food. Over the twenty four hours we contacted all four countries of the UK and as far south as Cornwall. I n total we raised nearly two thousand pounds for Hecarty and her family and they went off for a holiday in Majorca.
I still get very nostalgic about my cb days, it was a great period of camaraderie in my life.
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