Welcome to The 26CT1994 Blog

Welcome to The 26CT1994, thanks for dropping in!

I wanted to kick off this blog with an introduction so let me first tell you a little about myself and give you some background as to why this site came into being.
My call sign is 26CT1994 and I joined the Charlie Tango DX Group and squired my callsign in February 2016.  Since then I have become more and more involved in the hobby and have become quite enamoured with CB Radio all over again.

The Eighties

Like so many people, my early experiences with CB Radio stem back to the early Eighties when the Citizen Band phenomenon was at its peak.   Back then I was a short eleven year old and it feels like a long time ago which it actually was!

I remember first seeing CB Radio on the news with reports of it becoming more and more commonplace and the TV became full of the lobby for the Citizen Band frequencies to become legalised as it had been for some time in the USA.

As a child, my dad took me to the first (and possibly only) CB Radio show at Earl's Court in London.  I remember the Halls being full of different stalls stuffed with different CB Radio equipment and the Show being stuffed with hundreds of people covered in CB Radio patches and badges!

First Experiences

I was lucky enough to have a neighbour who had a CB Radio in his old Bedford motorhome and his son and I quickly became friends because of it.  You used to spend evenings sitting in that old Motor home talking to people in the local area.  Back then, the channels were busy most of the time and it was often difficult to find a free channel and sometimes even difficult to get 'in on the side' of an already busy channel.

After a few months my Dad realised that I was getting into this new craze and he managed to get hold of a cheap rig for me.  It took a bit of investment from him but after shelling out for a home base aerial and after he and my uncle clambered out on to the roof to erect it, I was on the air from home for the first time.

From then on, I spent most weekends and evenings sitting by that radio transfixed by the voices that came in.  Its difficult to describe how fascinating the CB Radio craze was back then.  It was the first time that groups of people were able to openly communicate with each other and there had never been anything like it before.

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