The Simple Guide To CB Radio. Everything You'll Need To Know To Get On The Air And Talking Made Easy

[Music] I'm coming in loud and clear might hear me on the radio hey guys it's Eric here at farpoint and tonight I want to make a video that I'm calling a simple guide to CB radio all right now let's get on to CB radio because that's what you watch this video for so CB radio is again a 4 watt am or 12 watt sideband and what that means is how much power it can push down range how far your voice can be heard and to do that you're looking at getting a radio like this and installing it in your car and you would also need to get an antenna and funny enough it's not how much power the radio puts out because they're all put out the same amount of power it's the antenna that makes more difference than anything else a nine foot width like this one right here on the back of my truck is going to get out spectacularly wear a three foot whip might get out pretty darn good as long as it's mounted in a good spot like this now one of these smaller antennas like the president New Virginia which I have on this car here well it's only going to get out maybe two miles and when I say get out that means it's range but you have options if you just want to know what's going on in a traffic situation do you need to have range longer than two miles no not really which is why I chose to put that smaller antenna on my Mirage now if I wanted a three foot antenna or a four foot antenna and put it on the top of my car well I'm going to have a pretty cool setup in fact I can do some of what these guys are doing and I can probably talk that skip where the signal bounces off the atmosphere comes down in a totally different state and I could do that for fun sitting in my car and with a nine foot antenna well you can talk to the world locally or far away it's really up to you it's really cool how that works as long as skip is working that day so that's what you're getting into to get a UCB radio you're looking at between five dollars and fifty dollars five dollar radio is going to be a real basic radio it might even be a 23 Channel radio like this one for twenty dollars you're probably going to end up with something like this this is a Radio Shack 40 channel AM it has all the features you would ever want and then for fifty dollars you're looking at getting a used sideband radio and that's this and now not to confuse you more but sideband is is like taking the 40 channels and splitting them in half but by doing so by squeezing the signal down the FCC has allowed more power to be pushed into it and so you're getting longer ranges that's the plus side the downside of that is that only other radios that are sideband capable radios will be able to hear your transmission properly you'll hear a garbled muffled voice if you only have an AM radio the vast majority of cars are going to have am only radios in them for good reason the universal channel for truckers here in the United States is Channel 19. Once Upon a Time Channel 9 was monitored by the police and fire and rescue because that's if you had an accident or something like that you could call out but those days are pretty much over here in the United States so you probably just want to stick with Channel 19. if you're going to use this for Highway use or back road use but it's okay to flip around in my area Channel 14 is actually the popular station locals talk on it both on base stations and in their car and so it's kind of the meeting Channel we find out what's going on in the area on Channel 14. so that's what's going on with an in-car install you'll need an antenna and those antennas can range anywhere from 22 dollars all the way up to nearly a hundred dollars make sure the antenna you get either comes with the coax cable that's the wire that goes between the antenna or the radio or that you set aside a couple extra bucks to get about an 18 foot run usually works in most modern cars now installing it I'll cover in another video but you will have to probably drill at least one hole sometimes you get lucky and there's a drain plug in your car somewhere or factory body plug that you can kind of pry out of the way and slip that wire through but a lot of times you will have to drill one small hole in your car if you put it underneath the carpet no one's ever going to know and it's never going to matter now on base stations which is what you see here now there are different types of Base stations there are base stations like this one here this is a unit in Washington that's a conventional old-school base station it plugs directly into the wall and then it Powers up and you are ready to go you hook up your a base antenna to it and you're talking locally and to the world or you could do what I have here and I have taken a mobile radio and I've added one extra component to it I have my mobile radio and then I have these which are power stations they're power it converts 120 volts to 12 volts because these run off of 12 volt batteries car batteries right now you can pick up one like this Radio Shack 3 amp well that cost me about seven dollars on eBay a lot of times now for a 3 amp which is three to seven is what you're going to want to look for for basic setup like any of these radios here you're looking at um you know between twenty dollars and say thirty five dollars if you want to get something larger like this one which is a 20 amp now you're looking a little bit more maybe 60 to 70 dollars so just something to keep in mind when you go out looking for it you can also if you want to do an off-grid type setup use a car battery you can take a car battery bring it inside and put it on a trickle charger and then when you want to use it you're just using it off of the old car battery when you're done using it that little trickle charger will bring it back up to a full charge just be aware if you're going to use an automotive battery inside your house they do off gas and that's not really good for you it's also can be explosive so I don't recommend having the battery in the house but you can have it outside with a solar panel charging and run it up to these radios which is actually how all these radios are running right now they're running off of solar outside so that's how base stations work but with base stations you do have additional cost so we've already talked about the cost of the radio in this case this was a brand new well it was refurbished it was 90 when I bought it now they go for about 110. and then the power supply was like I said I think I paid seven dollars for something like that so let's call it a hundred dollars cabling and you need this this cabling RG 8 or rg213 there's there's names for cabling I'll show you in a different video how all that works but you'll need a cable that goes from the radio to the antenna and antenna choices aren't the same you can't just use a car antenna and stick it on your roof and and have it work because the car's roof is actually part of the antenna it's made out of metal where unless you're in a mobile home with a tin roof or have a steel roof you're not going to get that same effect so you can actually damage your radio by trying to use a car radio or car antenna as a base setup but if you have a metal building like this one here has a steel roof or my old mobile home had a tin roof well then go ahead and use that if that's what you have and it'll work just great but let's say you put 50 feet of cabling up you're going to want a base station antenna I always bring this particular antenna because it's simply the cheapest best easiest to set up antenna it's the Antron or solarcon A99 here's a picture of it here and that antenna it will get you talking to the whole wide world and will last you many many years mine on the roof is 25 years old now and still working fine the last thing you're going to want to do to get on the air with a base station is grounded the antenna needs to have a ground rod pounded into the ground and a copper wire or aluminum down into it to ground it out because lightning is attracted to these things I've been blessed never to have a lightning strike here I've had close calls but never had one hit but it is not something you want to experience and another way to get a better signal of course is to ground the radio as well and you can do that by grounding it right through the ground Outlet on your outlet lastly you need to tune the system and you're going to think oh no I don't know how to do that well it's it's super easy you're going to need something called an SWR meter and I don't have one in here but here's a picture of one right here these are also available on the internet on eBay used they usually cost between seven and fifteen dollars and they will tell you what your signal reflected ratio is SWR right oh boy what are we what are we talking about you're losing me don't worry about it my friends it's not that hard you hook it in line with your radio and when you talk when you push to talk and you say hello right when you do that that little meter is going to move up and you're going to calibrate it and see how much the signal is reflected back we don't want any of this four Watts coming back down into the radio so the idea here is to tune the antenna and it's just a matter of turning a screw and then lifting and lowering the antenna slightly just just I mean one turn at a time a little bit up or a little bit down to get the lowest reflected ratio that way all four Watts go out the antenna you get the best range possible and you talk all night long without damaging your radio so that is The Simple Guide to CB radio it's a reason why you should get it it's how simple it can be to get into it and it's how cost effective it is especially compared to ham radio or a lot of other Hobbies quite frankly now in future videos I will definitely definitely go more in depth because it's been many years since I covered these topics and I think I covered them on VHS instead of 4K but I'll go into how to tune a mobile CB radio how to set up a mobile CB radio how to install a mobile CB how to ground your system for if you want to do a base station how to set up a base station antenna and more so stick around here on farpoint the next few months as we go through the winter will be fun we'll have all kinds of stuff and I'll even tell you where you can score radios like this which cost two dollars or this which costs 22 dollars or this which costs uh what ninety dollars new or refurbished I'll see you next time my friends take care

Channel: Farpoint Farms

Views: 61,023

Keywords: CB radio, how-to, sideband, realistic, radio shack, harbor freight, DIY, CB, HAM, ham radio, reviews, Citizens Band, How to use CB radio, How to get on the air, how to use radio, two way radio, intro to cb radio, how do I use a CB radio, how can I get a CB radio, new to CB radio, why do I need a CB radio, Is CB radio still used, is CB radio dead, CB radio in 2023

Id: LOXLKlp8Txk

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023