Comment Articles

Boss Hogg's guide to radio networking

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Jan 2003 16:31 GMT

It was the last gasp of the seventies. Punk was just beginning to crust up, Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher, had got her sensible shoes under the desk at Downing Street and the first theocracy of the atomic age was getting its groove on in Iran. But even as Tony Blackburn and Gary Numan made odd bedfellows on Wonderful Radio One, a different kind of broadcast was fascinating hundreds of thousands of otherwise sane people across the UK. In its grip, Fred Smith from Acacia Avenue became Night Warrior of The Double A, Julie Green of Plymouth became Fancy Pants from The Port City. Foreshadowing all the fuss about Internet chat rooms -- and attracting almost identical media vitriol -- Citizens Band was here.

Forgotten now, CB was huge then. Thanks to the Wireless Telegraphy Act and an almost Victorian sense of paternalism by the Home Office, the average UK citizen was no more allowed to transmit without a licence than he was to fly a jumbo jet, and the consequences of either seemed identical in the eyes of the law. Most of the time, that didn't matter: an odd smattering of dodgy geezers with army surplus transmitters occasionally made enough trouble to get noticed, but the usual rules applied: don't frighten the horses or interfere with anyone more important than you, and you won't get into too much trouble.

Other countries didn't see things that way. In particular, the USA had more of an "if you want to do it, then gee, why not" attitude and legalised two-way radios for non-hams. These soon got small and cheap enough to be brought back into the UK by visitors, who found the airwaves delightfully empty -- apart from a couple of weather balloons, some hospital bleepers and radio-controlled aircraft, the channels lay fallow. Then CB took off in the States on the back of the oil crisis as drivers used it to find which garages had petrol in stock. Suddenly it was a genuine cultural phenomenon.

That trickled over here, and before you could say give us a ten nine good buddy there were people marching on Parliament with placards demanding free speech on CB. As model aircraft around the country plummeted into doctors wondering what sort of medical emergency a "Bear In The Air" was, and a mere three years after it had effectively lost control of the airwaves, the government acted. It legalised CB -- on different frequencies and with different standards to the US model, to be sure, but you could go out and buy one and not fear the Grim Busbies.