Cb radio lingo history12/9/2023 ![]() ![]() The CBers who are doing it now are quite a closed, diehard community. It came up again more recently and the project got started. We had tinkered as kids, then he found a load of old eyeball cards in our hometown in a Salvation Army shop or something about ten years ago. How hard was it putting the book together? And almost like an analogue Tinder or Grindr – there's a disconnect between the image people put out there and the reality. We spoke to many people who met their partners on air. But there were female breakers, a lot of them. TV then was all a bit, "Oooh errr, missus, what are you doing? That's a big broom!" You know? Its more playing into that, I think – a sort of casual misogyny in popular humour. But as for these British cards, I think it's more to do with late-70s, 80s humour. In America quite recently there was a case of truckers using CB radio to talk about "pavement princesses", and even prostitutes advertising on CB radio. But also a far larger and very innocent side. Was this a male-dominated world? Was there a sexy side to it? Some of it's a bit "Shagger 69" lad humour. ![]() If we can get onto the actual designs of these cards… they're quite lewd, bawdy at times. "Dreamy Town" is Bedfordshire – maybe some weird cockney slang thing there. Like, "Black Pudding City" is Bury, "The Big Sea" is Croydon, "Dead City" is Birmingham. And then you move into the geographical areas, which all have their own weird esoteric names in CB world. Then there's your "20", which is your location. brevity codes, a bit like Q code, or the Ten Code the police use. 73s and 88s are like hugs and kisses, or "fond regards". Those, of course, aren't frequencies, but are things like 10-10, which means "10-10, 'til we meet again," which means: we have met, I acknowledge you. Is there an informal CB language of sorts? Lots of numbers that come up again and again. There seems to be a sort of code on the cards. There were reports of people living near someone with a CB set up having radio dialogue with someone in Holland or something coming through a turned off radio set in their home. Anyway, the problem was that they claimed these CBs were operating on the same frequencies as pacemakers, emergency services, hospital equipment and so on. With CB it's much more focused, usually working within a 10 to 15 mile radius… though depending on atmospheric conditions, the size of your aerial, you could get to France, even America sometimes. Ham radio is different, and there are myriad channels you can use. The frequencies that these CB radios operate on is a very narrow bandwidth – I won't go into the very technical side in case your eyeballs burst into flames with boredom – but there's about 40 channels on a CB. Its hard to tell how justified it all was. There was a period of hysteria about it in the UK, and some pretty funny old coverage you can see on YouTube. Well, it was legal to own a CB radio here, but not to use one. It was legal to own one in Britain, right? ![]() I mean, they had all sorts of applications. They were used in the Toxteth riots to organise the rioting, too. There was even some quite fun, massively patronising literature at the time, along the lines of: "Imagine you are a woman! Stuck, far from anywhere!" But it was genuinely useful for people in remote areas to have this form of comms. It found a use before mobile communication was widely available. ![]() There was that whole American scene, and it was part of rural culture a lot of the actual CB radios have crazy Western names like Cobra or Colt. They started adopting walkie-talkies and these radio devices to communicate about which stations or pumps had fuel, for example, or the fastest routes between A and B. Yeah, truckers in the 60s and 70s, dealing with strikes and fuel crises. I guess it was, in a way, the analogue social media, yes.Īnd it kicked off with truckers in America? Sharing tips and so on? It's also totally unmoderated, too! A modern incarnation of it is an app called CB Chat, which is quite possibly unearthing a tinderbox of mental illness in the populace, though there are some diehard CBers on there too. People with certain hardware talking anonymously to each other? In my mind it's almost like some sort of analogue, pre-internet chat room. VICE: For those who haven't seen the book yet, talk me through CB radio. ![]()
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