CB channel 19, 27.185 MHz: truckers, AM and summer skip

What you hear

Voices in AM, the mode of an old transistor radio, with the carrier whistle and the hiss that go with it: short, loud, often overlapping, with the slang of the road. On a normal day a receiver on 27.185 MHz hears drivers within ten or twenty kilometres asking about queues, police checks and road works, and the language depends on where the receiver stands: Polish on a Polish motorway, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian. Then comes a summer afternoon when the band opens, and the channel fills with voices from a thousand kilometres away and more, each strong for a few minutes and then gone, talking over the locals. That is skip, and CB operators have a culture of it: calling CQ on the channels above, collecting far contacts, exchanging their own numbered callsigns.

The sound is rough compared with amateur SSB. CB sets are cheap and many are driven hard; expect distortion, echo effects, background music and the occasional roger beep. With the receiver in AM the voices come through without tuning; switch to USB only if someone is working sideband, which on channel 19 is rare.

Who transmits and why

Anyone. CB, the citizens band, is the slice of 27 MHz that most countries opened to the public without a licence: forty channels from 26.965 to 27.405 MHz, a few watts, AM, FM or SSB depending on the country. It was the mobile phone of the 1970s and 1980s, and the one community that never left is the road: in much of Europe and in North America channel 19 is where lorries talk to each other and to anyone who answers. In Russia drivers traditionally use channel 15 in AM, and in Poland and Russia many sets run on a grid shifted 5 kHz lower, so the same traffic may be found at 27.180 MHz. The talk is practical, traffic, weather, where the police are, and a good deal of chat to pass the hours.

CB is not amateur radio: no exam, no callsigns in the formal sense, no band plan beyond the channel list. It lives in the amateur rubric of the catalogue because it sits just below the 10 m band and behaves the same way: dead when the ionosphere is quiet, alive across continents when it is not.

When and where to listen

Locally, any time there are lorries nearby, so a receiver near a motorway hears the most, and weekday daytime more than nights. For skip, late spring and summer, May to August, from late morning to evening, when sporadic E brings signals from 500 to 2000 km in bursts of an hour or two; in the active years of the solar cycle, autumn and winter afternoons add intercontinental openings, and voices from the Americas appear in Europe. Nearly every shortwave receiver on the list reaches 27.185 MHz, so pick one by region: a receiver in Italy or Poland in summer gives the thickest channel.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Amateur radio → CB 27.185 MHz. The program picks a public receiver that covers 27.185 MHz, tunes it and sets AM with a wide passband, so the voices come through as on a CB set. No receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed; the program only listens, and in CB, as in amateur radio, that is open to anyone.