I completely lost interest in radio engineering after my stint as a radio professional in the military operating VLF to SHF, morse to high speed digital, land, sea, and air. 6 month long 12 on 12 off shifts locked in a crypto vault for years is like a professional baker and donuts. You can be extremely good at your work but yet, it's still work. Radio is a like a aroma that makes my bones hurt. I know the craft like the back of my hand but there is no interest in it.

I don't miss the endless product development cycles with the crushing weeks of effort on end to make the next demo or the next trade show. None of it contributed to my health, or my longevity, or my sense of well being. In fact I believe that more than a decade after my last product development was complete, pretty much everything I ever did is now in the landfill.

 

I completely lost interest in radio engineering after my stint as a radio professional in the military operating VLF to SHF, morse to high speed digital, land, sea, and air. 6 month long 12 on 12 off shifts locked in a crypto vault for years is like a professional baker and donuts. You can be extremely good at your work but yet, it's still work. Radio is a like a aroma that makes my bones hurt. I know the craft like the back of my hand but there is no interest in it.

With all the respect I owe to you, on account of what you are currently working on (damn if I know what it actually is), all I could say is: You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.

 

I completely lost interest in radio engineering after my stint as a radio professional in the military operating VLF to SHF, morse to high speed digital, land, sea, and air. 6 month long 12 on 12 off shifts locked in a crypto vault for years is like a professional baker and donuts. You can be extremely good at your work but yet, it's still work. Radio is a like a aroma that makes my bones hurt. I know the craft like the back of my hand but there is no interest in it.

I don't miss the endless product development cycles with the crushing weeks of effort on end to make the next demo or the next trade show. None of it contributed to my health, or my longevity, or my sense of well being. In fact I believe that more than a decade after my last product development was complete, pretty much everything I ever did is now in the landfill.

Badges of honor, gentlemen. Our forefathers endured worse and with luck our children will not fully know what we lived.

 

With all the respect I owe to you, on account of what you are currently working on (damn if I know what it actually is), all I could say is: You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.

I still work with RF today mainly in RF LINAC systems so I still use the knowledge gained years ago to analyze RF power transfer issues in industrial systems. I'm interested in the energy transfer to matter instead of radiation and reception.

 

How many Horse Powers does that thing have? It's a caterpillar drive for the Red October isn't it?

 

How many Horse Powers does that thing have? It's a caterpillar drive for the Red October isn't it?

It's a baby. Full power RF is only 30KW with 80KV per acceleration vacuum chamber for up to 3MeV total acceleration for triple charged ions. There are 10 chambers (resonators) with electrostatic quadrupoles to control focus between chambers.

 

So... is that the thing that spits out the electron to get the quarks and such things?

 

So... is that the thing that spits out the electron to get the quarks and such things?

Nope, It's not a scientific instrument. It's used to dope semiconductors with ions.

 

My wife hates ioning

 

Back to the original discussion about building a CB transceiver, I did build a tube type one a long time ago.The rec was a superhet from an article in a 1967 Radio/Electonics magazine. The trans part was copied from a Knight Kit CB radio . It sort of worked but the crystals were the big expense.
Those radios that appear to have a lot in the microphone really just have the frequency setting parts there, and a fat cable to the rest. Not a good design by any standard.
Certainly a CB transceiver is possible, but since presently they are all using synthesizers which are rather tricky to get working, q multi-channel radio will be quite an exercise. and the price of crystals has gone goofy-high, so you would need a synth. A VFO could work but that is not at all legal on CB channels.
There are a whole lot of circuits available on line, the big challenge is in the physical building of the radio.

 

using synthesizers which are rather tricky to get working

An Arduino driving an Si5251 board is very easy to get going for the synthesizer now. Much better than the PLLs of old. With these chips, single Hz tuning is available.

I have done a number of radio conversions from crystals to fully tune able. That part is not the problem. The analog RF parts are harder.
The radios I have done include an FT-75B, a PCM Hawk, A Trio 7200 VHF transceiver and an USB/LSB switching for a Codan 8525B.
Total price of replacing the crystals is less that $20. The Arduino in the Trio VHF set even generates the CTCSS tones as required.
Currently, I'm working on a full conversion of a couple of Codans, and another HF set that on the spur of the moment I forget the type.

 

I recall dreaming, when I was quite young and not active as a ham yet, with a Collins mechanical filter for SSB. Never got one, of course.

 

OK, the photo shows a breakout board, which is a whole lot less than the whole system. One real benefit of that approach would be no frequency multiplication required, which may be useful to avoid harmonics problems. And it could generate both the LO and the transmit frequencies. So that would solve a big portion of the hardware challenge. But it would need to be programmed and have a user interface, so the TS would not be quite home-free. The rest of the radio is totally straightforward, an AM receive string and an AM transmitter with all class "C" stages, and adequate filtering.
The one remaining thing to make a CB radio useful in todays CB world will be a squelch system that only responds to voices and ignores the very high ambient signal levels. There has been published a circuit that claims to do just that, but it is relatively complex, using about 6 IC devices. Prior to my CAD computer crashing I was working on a circuit board to implement that circuit, since it could be useful to a great many folks.
There is still a place for CB radio, and it is not at all the same as for Ham radio. Many Ham operators need to understand that.