Thread: Please school me up on CB radios

You'll probably wand a "Dual Band" radio. Might need a specialist shop, as your garden variety CB's don't normally have this ability.

The UHF CB are now 80 channel so you shouldn't be buying a 40 channel even though it's still legal to use them, the 80 Ch will allow you a little more privacy on the channel for your local group. As not many people have the 80Ch sets yet.

You can SCAN several channels and the set will go to the channel that has activity. With this system the radio will stay on the channel with current or loudest activity. So it is possible to miss some of the transmissions on the monitored channel.

The military do what you want by using 2 radios and feeding each radio into one side of a head-set, so you get radio1 on the left ear and radio2 on the right ear, they usually have the PTT key on the main channel and the radio op has to select the secondary chanel before they can transmit on the secondary.

You can achieve the same without the harness, by a stereo headset and a adapter that feeds one set into each side and using a common (vehicle) ground.

The correct term for it IS 'dual watch'. I remember the same thing in my marine VHF radio as well. The feature is available on modern UHF radios. Just google 'dual watch UHF' and you will get several hits such as this one:

:: Uniden Australia ::

Hope this helps.
Gwen

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

.....


You can SCAN several channels and the set will go to the channel that has activity. With this system the radio will stay on the channel with current or loudest activity. ....

.

.. perhaps just to clarify (no intended pun) this, most of the modern 40ch and 80ch GME UHF sets (and I assume other comparables) do allow the user to selectively bypass channels on the scan which may have activity that is not wanted/needed - therefore overcoming such a situation as this ?
(ie., "the radio will stay on the channel with current or loudest activity")

therefore I assume that, if a user only wanted to scan, say, 5 channels, the bypass procedure for all the others could be gone through at startup ? - a little tedious perhaps.....

... but most seem to have selcal ability ...

My uniden tx3220 has a priority channel set it to what ever ch you and your friends are on but still listen to the others. Most modern UHF radios have a similar fuction

The problem with all of the SCAN, Priority, selcall functions are that you are only listening to one channel at a time, which if I understood correctly is not what Hay Ewe is after. He has a desire for a "support" vehicle/s to be monitoring both the cyclist/support chat channel and Ch 40 for highway information simultaneously. The only way you can do that is to have 2 radios on the different channels.

The other option, which will depend on the distances between the cyclists and other cyclists and also the support vehicle/s, is to use some of the motor cycle intercoms, they have types that can talk between the rider an pillion passenger and others that can also talk to a group of motor cyclists and most are voice activated. e.g. the Scala Rider G4 can provide communications between 3 bikes up to 1.6Km apart The most powerful motorcycle Bluetooth scala rider yet so this system would give blue tooth intercom between the support vehicle and 2 cyclists. Perhaps one to the intercom vendors can pair the intercom sets to more than 3 sets providing coms between the cyclists and support. then you only need one UHF CB set to monitor Ch40 constantly (or have one in each of the support vehicles)

Use a handheld to scan and the other for chatter, or visa/versa

Baz.

Originally Posted by Redback

Use a handheld to scan and the other for chatter, or visa/versa

Baz.

Nailed it Baz.