Vintage CB radio ads

Turbo,
Thanks very much for posting all those ads. It's great to see the abbreviated specs, and the selling features for all those classics. Also fun to see a lot of the radios I've been collecting and refurbishing the past couple of years (Royce, Lafayette) in all their original glory.
Or at least what passed for it back then
-- Handlebar --

 

good to see these old radios

 

Cool adds. I seen my first CB listed, Johnson Messenger 123, was a real good little mobile.

 

Nice to see somethings over time have came down in price! Now ya know why CB Radios are no longer built in the US...

 

Gosh, thanks for the memories. I drove for Radio Shack in Canada, starting in 1976, in the middle of the CB craze.

I had a TRC 52, 23 channel, which became my radio of choice. Every once in a while they would hand you a prototype to try in the truck. Some radios made it to the retail level, and some didn't do well. I even tried an in-dash CB with am/fm cassette. The CB came over the stereo speakers. What a novel idea. That radio bombed, as there was too much technology in the unit, which created reliability issues.

When the 40 channels came out, I was given a TRC 447, which I still have today, and it still works well.

Back in the day, running northern Ontario and western Canada, there were a lot of base stations we use to talk to. There were a few that were running the Browning Golden Eagle. What a radio, and what a unique sound when they keyed up.

We use to do some of our store deliveries after hours, and we would contact a base station to call the store owner or manager to meet us at the store. It saved having to stop at a pay phone. This was long before the advent of the cell phone.

The driver camaraderie was really something back then. I had met a lot of people and made lots of friends, thanks to the radio. Driving for Radio Shack, we were targets for other drivers with radios.

Now the CB, at least here in Canada, has become a thing of the past. There is still a bit of chatter, but not much. I guess with other forms of entertainment, especially satellite radio, driver tend to turn their CB down or off.

Drivers in our western provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, are leaning more towards VHF. You could drive 600 miles from Calgary to Vancouver, and not hear one person on the CB, but from what some driver tell me, the VHF is quite busy.

My how things have change over the years

 

i still own a working motorola mocat 40 cb radio with owners manual and a Lafayette 625 mobile cb 23 channel radio that works just fine and a couple other older radios the skip has been so good lately 3 watts got me a contact in georgia from kansas using a wilson lil wil magnet mount antenna love all cb radios even the older midland

 

Very cool post! Brought back some memories. Thanks!

 

I feel really old after looking at memory lane......
have used most of these over the years and still have some of them (not for sale btw)

 

Plug in tubes?
Nothing can go wrong there.
Zap