What were the first Uk legal CB radios ?

[lambrettadave]

The big shops got in on the action with Rotel, York, binatone, amstrad, Harvard to name a few

[KILLERPARSNIP]

Wasn't the delta tune to allow it to better receive transmission from Illegal radios using FM on Hi band?

It was used on older AM CB radios as each one varied a little on Frequency either drifting as they warmed or just generally, this allowed you to hear others that were just a little bit of frequency.

[lambrettadave]

Wasn't the delta tune to allow it to better receive transmission from Illegal radios using FM on Hi band?

I personally think that a lot of pointless controls were put on the top of the range legal CB radios.

[Antoni]

The cheap crystals in chicken boxes at that time sometimes didn't 'age' well. I found the delta-tune useful because it improved the audio listening to some transmissions. Most of those radios I look at these days are still very close and some had never had their cases off - original owner from new for example.

One I don't see talked about is the Transcom GB2000. I remember them right at the start of legality because even tho places like Dixons sold radios, there was a big department store at one end of the Four Seasons centre in Mansfield who not only had them on display but they were powered-up and connected to an antenna. I tuned around in the shop but it was dead and noisy. They were absolutely ...err... not very good.

[GrahamG]

LCL2740
I remember a radio with the brand "Shadow" being advertised. It looked like the Rotel 240, but I don't think they were ever made.

They were, but with 'Rotel' badges on rather than 'Shadow'! I remember the 'Shadow' radios being previewed in, was it Citizen's Band magazine? I still have the magazine somewhere. The tooling / appearance is exactly the same as that of the Rotels. Maybe 'Shadow' was just a working title while Rotel, traditionally an audio (stereo unit) manufacturer, agonised over whether to put their brand name on them or not.

I would say that the majority of the 27/81 mobiles we remember now were available -somewhere- right on day one, November 2nd 1981. Certainly I bought a Binatone 5-Star and a Binatone Speedway (for my parents) on that day and both of these radios and the Fidelity 2000 mentioned above and many more radios besides all used the Cybernet 134 chassis so pretty much any radio using that chassis was potentially available from the get-go.

The only set I remember having to wait for was the Realistic TRC-1001 handheld which I'd had on pre-order for a long time, that didn't arrive in the shop until a couple of weeks later.

[GrahamG]

I personally think that a lot of pointless controls were put on the top of the range legal CB radios.

Oh, tell me about it. One of the worst cases I can think of is the Midland home base - lovely looking radio but Cybernet really had to scrape the barrel to invent purposes for all of the controls which had mostly useful functions on the original USA AM/SSB version of the set. I think it has not one, but two tone controls - one rotary (Tone) and one switched, called 'Filter'.

Let's be honest, an FM-only radio only needs channel, squelch, volume control and maybe, occasionally, RF gain if you are operating in an RF-rich enviroment. But that's all.

Mic gain? Pointless, why would you want to turn your TX audio output level to -less- than the maximum permitted amount (legally, the mic gain control couldn't increase it to more than that, so 'mic gain' is in reality 'mic attenuator'.

Dimmer? Which only works on the LEDs and not the meter light? Nope.

Tone? I always just leave this set to the brightest / trebliest setting.

Delta Tune - accidentally ended up coming in handy when people with older rigs with hi-band tried to talk to us from 1/3rd of a channel away. Not what it was actually intended for.

Hi/Lo power - originally laughably required to be used to reduce your output power as a penalty for putting up a decent aerial, this did actually come in handy for reducing the number of 'Side! Who's On? Who's asking?'... encounters when you just wanted to have a quiet chat with someone not too far away.

CH9 - would only ever have been useful if we had successfully developed an organisation similar to REACT in the USA, and if channel 9 had been given protected legal status as an emergency-only channel.

However, you did sometimes get a little bit more for your money other than a few useless extra controls. Basic radios using the Cybernet 134 chassis have one less I.F. coil in the receiver than mid to high end models using the same chassis, so while they couldn't improve anything about the transmitter - they couldn't sell you more output power of course, they did at least give you a more selective receiver in the mid to high end models.