CB Ham radio QSL card gallery

Swapatorium has a gallery of cards that CB radio operators mail to each other. My favorite is "Country Boy's" card, which shows his moonshine powered radio. Link

[#1 posted by Anonymous , September 19, 2007 11:35 AM]

Just for the record, this is a CB QSL card. There is a difference. (Not in the cards, but in the radio service.)

[#2 posted by Anonymous , September 19, 2007 11:38 AM]

That's a CB card, not a ham card.

Remember what happens when you call a Scotsman English? That's what happens when you confuse CBers and hams.

[#3 posted by Anonymous , September 19, 2007 11:45 AM]

The card shown is actually refers to a CB radio operator, not a ham. (the callsign is a dead giveaway)

[#4 posted by phasor3000 , September 19, 2007 11:53 AM]

Ham radio may seem quaint and outdated, but in the event of a natural disaster or a failure of the power grid, ham radio operators with generators are really, really valuable.

[#5 posted by Man On Pink Corner , September 19, 2007 11:56 AM]

Cute QSL card, but that's a CB call, not a ham call. CB'ers:hams :: script kiddies:hackers. :)

[#6 posted by Anonymous , September 19, 2007 11:58 AM]

This post needs some clarification in a hurry.

First off, yes this is a QSL card. However it is NOT an Amateur Radio (Ham)QSL. The terminology "break", "73's, and "88's" are all Citizen Band radio terms. The call sign too is a CB call sign from back in the day of FCC licenses. And lastly, the fact that they advertise channels (5,13,19,23)is a dead give away. No respectable ham radio operator would ever be caught using a "cb" radio. And they all claim to know morse code too!

[#7 posted by eclectro , September 19, 2007 12:04 PM]

Those are not Ham Rasio qsl cards, but CB (Citizen Band) qsl cards, which makes them more interesting imo, as the FCC stopped issuing CB callsigns back in the 80s. Ham Radio cards are far more sophisticated with more technical data on them.

One can only guess what illegal equipment these CBers were using to accomplish these contacts, as citizen band radios are limited by law to 4-5 watts of power which technically would limit the radios to the same town that you are in. While there is ion skip which can greatly increase distances, it just does not happen that often.

But I suppose that if one has an illegal still to make moonshine, it would not be hard for him to have an illegal amp too!

[#8 posted by lashner , September 19, 2007 12:24 PM]

1: This post inspired me to create and account after reading Boing Boing for years.

2: I just realized that theses are CB and HAM cards and my comment isn't near as relevent.

3: That won't stop me from posting it anyway

My father was and is HAM. I remember seeing all the ones he had. The cards were displayed in a long hanging sleeve. He had tons of them.

Which makes sense. During my childhood (20ish years ago) he was very big in to high-power HAM. He had a home-built amp that would scramble the TV when he keyed up. We could actually hear him through the TV. Was very annoyed at the time, but now I realize we only had three stations anyway.

Anybody ever go to HAMfest? It's like a big flea market / swap meet. Very fascinating group of folks there.

[#9 posted by gnosis , September 19, 2007 12:47 PM]

Whoa - amazing! I found tons more here:
http://hamgallery.com/qsl

[#10 posted by ricket , September 19, 2007 1:06 PM]

For any non-hams out there… 73 means best regards and 88 means love and kisses. Hams (and CB'ers?) use all sorts of crazy abbreviations. Some of this was out of international practicality (language barriers) and some was probably stems the fact that everyone used to use morse code. Do a google on codes like QSL, QTH, etc… to see what I mean. Nice post!

[#11 posted by Anonymous , September 19, 2007 1:26 PM]

wow, this really makes me want to dust off my call number and learn how to use a ham radio i have a license for. i got it as credit for a science project back in highschool and have sadly never even operated one. i should contact my local ham radio club and see if i can team up with someone to learn how to use it. as a previous poster said, ham radio could be one of the few ways to provide communication in the event of a disaster and living on the san andreas fault certainly poses a threat. it's always best to be prepared and keep these techonolgies thriving!

[#12 posted by Anonymous , September 19, 2007 1:35 PM]

In reply to Lashner, I was just at a hamfest a few weeks ago. A good combination of common chatty folks, nerdy hardware hackers, and old farmers. It's quite a bit of fun and you can pick up some good equipment (both radio and computer) at good prices. While guys are out to make money, there's a friendly atmosphere because everyone's a ham. Some good contests and interesting events sometimes too. I highly suggest it.

[#13 posted by OM , September 19, 2007 1:40 PM]

...Boy, do those QSL cards bring back memories or what? I was a Chicken Band enthusiast from 1975 to 1981, and saw lots of things happen to the band and its users that are seriously deserving of a book or two to discuss just how the CB craze evolved and how it died out the way it did.

...As for power...yep, a *LOT* of us ran linears and beam antennas over the height limit, but after 1978 it became really easy to do so thanks to Uncle Charley - the FCC - getting both its balls cut off by a double neutering at the hands of both the Ford administration and the Carter debacle. In both cases, the FCC had busted some relative of the president in question - Betty Ford's nephew and Billy Carter, respectively - and as a result they had their budgets cut drastically.

...At the same time, the courts ruled - after some subtle White House urgings - that the FCC didn't have the legal right to charge fees for licenses, nor collect fines for rules violations(*). With a lowered budget and no right to extort funds from normal people in the same way small town Gestapos use speeding tickets, the FCC was forced to reduce its field agent force from ~10-30 agents per state, to just *two* - except for Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and New Mexico, which got only one!

...The end result was that CB was free to become a Chaos Band, where pretty much anything gone and went. Not that it lasted all that long, because the CB Craze got dealt its own double-whammy. First up was the increase from 23 to 40 channels. While some might say that more channels meant more room to talk without "walking all over" other CBers, what happened instead was that there was *too* mugh room. When the first-time CBer turned on his rig, he'd become conditioned to expect thousands of people yakking away. Instead of 19-20 channels of constant jabber, after 1977 they found 40 channels of infrequent traffic, if any at all. Where 23 channels - actually 21, considering that 9 and 11 were for emergency and/or special traffic only - forced everyone to concentrate and comingle, those extra 17 channels
allowed everyone to spread out. While the amount of traffic on the entire band may have been the same, the fact that it was spread across 40 channels diluted the traffic to the point where it seemed as if nothing was going on.

...And then there's the other half of the double-whammy: the Sunspot Peak. Everyone these days knows about the 11-year sunspot cycle. From 1979 to 1981, the cycle hit its peak. While Hams, Elmers and OMs around the world love this for the DX opportunities, the 10-11m bands are usually the ones hardest hit - which is one of the reasons CB was assigned to the 11m band in the first place. The "skip" from the E and Sporadic-F layer ionization totally fracked local to medium-range communications, while allowing "Skipland" communications across the country as if they were right next door! So, with nobody apparently out there, and even if they were you couldn't hear them unless they were in the next state, CB died a rather ignoble death. In fact, when the FCC officially declared the 11m band the first "licensless band", it was more of a tombstone than an attempt to breathe life back into the craze.

...Still, CB radio did have two important side effects: remember those early IBM PC's, with their 4.77MHz Xtals, and their 5-pin DIN KB connectors? The reason IBM used those in the original 5150 designs was that the parts had been lying in electronics warehouses with no buyers, and were totally dirt-cheap. IBM saved a *LOT* of money using those parts, and passed the savings on to their stockholders :-)

(*) This ruling wound up overturning some $2M USD in fines levvied against CBers who'd been busted for running linear amps, using profanity, or exceeding the "five minute limit". When you consider the maximum fine that could be assigned was $500.00 USD, that's a lot of pink slips from a lot of overzealous Charleys!

[#14 posted by strider_mt2k , September 19, 2007 1:44 PM]

Crystal sets were the gateway to Shortwave listening and CB was the gateway to Amateur radio for me.

73 DE N2NLQ!! :D

[#15 posted by chowderhead , September 19, 2007 2:59 PM]

I got a Ham license in 1989 and still hold Advanced ticket KD1AV. I had a lot of fun with it when I was active, making contacts all around the world in CW (continuous wave, aka Morse Code) and voice, using 100 watts fed into a wire antenna. My favorite way to operate was QRP, which means low power, generally less than three watts. I spent one summer in a cabin in the Cape Cod woods, making dozens of contacts in the US and Europe with 100 feet of #28 magnet wire tossed up into the tallest pine tree I could find, and my trusty Heathkit HW-8. Yes it sounds corny, but it was before the heyday of the Internet, and I had put the whole thing together myself, so there was a lot of satisfaction to go along with the joy of talking to Marco in Italy or something. And the QSL cards were the icing on the cake. QSL is Q-code for "I am receiving you", and they are traded by all types of radio enthusiasts, including shortwave listeners and people who listen for domestic broadcasts long distance. Computers soon took over my need for things electronic, but I did have a lot of fun as a Ham.

chowderhead

[#16 posted by congolia , September 19, 2007 3:34 PM]

My Dad was a CB'er in the 60's and early 70's.

I still have a card catalog with about 2000 old QSL cards (about 100 are copies of the one he sent out).

Some of them are downright randy (and some, sadly, racist).

Glad to see someone is doing something with them.

[#17 posted by ricket , September 19, 2007 4:39 PM]

This is a fun entry, so I'll elaborate some more… I'm likewise a ham and got my Novice ticket at age 11 in the early 80s. My first rig was a CW-only radio that ran off a lantern battery and I had a string of copper wire along the roof for my antenna (a dipole antenna). With that meager 2W setup I was able to log numerous contacts across the US and other countries. These cards are sent from one station to another to document a transmission, so it became a game to collect as many as you could. There were "awards" for contacting every state, every continent/country, for doing it with low power, and many other reasons. But mostly it was just for the fun and satisfaction of communicating with the world pre-internet.

I bet many in the modern internet world would be surprised to know what can be and was done with radios… e.g. make phone calls from the 2M radio in your car (like a cell phone), sending photographs (fsk, SSTV, etc) - like a JPEG email attachment?, bouncing signals off the moon, etc… and like the internet, all for free.

73s,
KA9MPY

[#18 posted by OM , September 19, 2007 7:02 PM]

...Actually, I forgot a *third* side effect of the CB Craze: it showed potential radio enthusiasts that you didn't need to waste time having to learn Morse Code in order to get some sort of voice comm privs. Although it took almost two more decades of dwindling Novice and Tech licence apps to finally push it through, once the genii was let out of the bottle there was no way that any argument by an Elmer or OM - whether it be "it's for your own good because only CW will work after the Commies nuke you!" or "We had to do it, so quit being a pussy and learn code!" - in favor of the code would be heeded, much less *not* ridiculed as the blatherings of a complete psychotic. Had the Hams embraced a code-free ticket with decent band access in the early 80's, they'd have picked up the best of those abandoning CB as a fad and Ham Radio would have been bigger than ever.

[#19 posted by ricket , September 20, 2007 12:52 AM]

Hey OM, the hams never wanted the CB people to join their ranks. Hams follow rules, CB'ers didn't. I honestly don't think the anti-code-requirement-whiners had much to do with it (for crying out loud, I passed the FCC code tests as a child). Rather, computing exploded in the 80s and 90s. All the people that were into electronics, communication, engineering, hobbies, etc… bought Commodore 64s instead of radios.

[#20 posted by Anonymous , September 20, 2007 4:13 AM]

My Dad was a ham...
Thanks for the memories about the TV noise and snow... :)

Interrupted Dave Garroway or someone... Lone Ranger perhaps.

We met lots of nice people through his radio years as well.

Anyway, I wish he could be around to see high speed internet. He would be IMPRESSED!

Thanks again

[#21 posted by eclectro , September 21, 2007 1:28 AM]

Not saying one group is any better than the other, but I do agree with the sentiment that Hams and CBers are two different groups.

I'm also glad for my CW experience as a ham. While an earlier nocode would have helped some with membership, the thing about ham radio is that it's a "total" experience. It's just not about setting up a station, but learning how to operate that station and improving communication.

Both groups had/have their place. I do think that CB degenerated into something else from what these qsl cards represent, and ham radio got displaced by the internet. But out of the two, ham radio is going to be more endearing as it has more tradition behind it.

I would like to see the league steer it to complement the internet better. I really think it could be done, and ham radio could have another golden age.