Breaker Breaker

Breaker, breaker

On a CB everybody in range shares one channel, and only one radio can send at a time: you press the button on the microphone to talk and let go to listen. So before you say anything you ask for the channel. Breaker is the asking, often with the channel’s number, breaker one-nine, and then you wait for somebody to come back to you before you go on.

Nineteen is the channel the interstate keeps on. Highway talk was once on 10 east of the Mississippi and on 19 west of it, and 19 won in most places: 10 sits right beside channel 9, which the FCC has kept for emergencies since 1969, and 19 does not. People called it the trucker’s channel. The radio on the dash in the picture is on it.

Citizens

The citizens band is named for who it was for. When the Federal Communications Commission began its personal radio services in 1945, it was to give citizens a band of their own to talk on, for their families and their businesses and for flying model aeroplanes, and the first handsets made for it sold mostly to farmers and the Coast Guard. The band everybody now means by CB, on 27 MHz, came in 1958 with 23 channels, and the 40 channels a set has now came in 1977.

That set it apart from amateur radio, the hams’ band, which asks you to pass an exam before you transmit; in the United States, until February 2007, the exam took in Morse code. The citizens band asked only for a licence you bought, twenty dollars in the early 1970s and four from March 1975, and a call sign to go with it. At the height of the craze a great many people ignored all that and made up a name for themselves instead, a handle. On 28 April 1983 the licence went altogether. The band belonged to whoever switched a set on.

That is the word this street took. Citizen is what everybody who lives here is: a room somebody brings to the street takes the street’s conventions as they arrive, which Your Room calls part of being a citizen here, and a convention anybody dislikes goes to the Town Hall, where conventions are talked over and can change. Our CB takes an invite to join, from stimpunks.org’s Community page, and once you are on it nobody is more of a citizen than anybody else. Everybody goes by a handle they chose, and nobody on the channel is ranked or counted.

From the citizens band to ours

The CB on this street, the radio in the corner of every page once you are signed on, is a chat channel patterned after citizens band radio. It was Ryan’s idea, and this is what came across:

A handle

You are on the channel as a name you chose, and everybody on it knows you by it.

A channel everybody shares, and one of your own

World is the channel the whole street shares, the way 19 is the one everybody on the interstate leaves on. Every room has a channel of its own too, this one included, the way a town on the CB used to keep a home channel, so people from there could find each other without crowding the calling channel.

Channel 19

At its smallest, the radio is a drawing of a CB set on its own case with its readout on 19, and until 26 September 2026 the bar said CH 19 where Teleport is now.

The squelch

Switch on Speak new messages aloud and every message keys up with a burst of static and lets go with a tail of it, which is the sound a CB makes. At the Gentle setting you get the words without the static.

Off is off

Open and in front of you, the radio listens. Fold it away and it sends nothing, like a set switched off.

On the air, then gone

A CB keeps nothing: once something has been said, it has gone by. Ours keeps fifty messages, each for 48 hours, and Take off takes one off the air.

Reading the mail

Listening without saying anything is fine on ours as well. Nobody is counted, and you are on Who’s online only if you press Be seen here.

BASE

BASE beside a name is one of our moderators, after the base station, the CB set at home rather than out on the road.

Wikipedia’s history of the band puts the likeness plainly:

This room has its own channel too: with the radio on, press This room and you are on Breaker Breaker’s. The CB guide goes through the radio part by part, and the Community Center is where you get started.

Routing around the face to face

Amateur radio and the citizens band are different services, and Steve Silberman is writing about the first of them:

A radio you can talk on without being seen, a channel you can listen to for as long as you like before you say anything, and a name you chose for yourself: none of that was made for Autistic people, and a great many of us have found a home in it all the same, on the air and later in text. The channel on this street is text first for that reason, and you can stay on it reading the mail for as long as you want.

The Repeater, past the last streetlight at the end of the Outskirts road, is the street’s other radio: a mast on a ridge that hears everybody, built on our Shared-Signal Space entry.

The long haul

After the oil crisis of 1973 the United States brought in a 55 mph speed limit across the whole country, and fuel was short and rationed. Truckers, many of them paid by the mile, used their radios to find the stations that had fuel, to warn each other about speed traps, and to organise the blockades and convoys of a strike in 1974 against the new limit and other rules on the trade. By the middle of the decade the sets had spread far beyond the trucks. The First Lady, Betty Ford, went by First Mama, and Mel Blanc talked on the air in Los Angeles as Bugs or as Daffy, in their voices.

Truck-driving country is the country music of all that: trucks and truck stops, CB radio, roads, weather and loneliness, and Wikipedia’s article calls it, at least partly, an oral history of trucking. Terry Fell put out Truck Drivin’ Man in 1954, and Dave Dudley, Red Sovine and Jerry Reed are in it. So is C. W. McCall, a truck-driving country singer whom Bill Fries, an art director at an Omaha advertising agency, made up for a series of bread commercials and recorded with Chip Davis. Convoy went to number one in January 1976. Fries retired to Ouray, Colorado, and was its mayor from 1986 to 1992.

Dale Watson put out The Truckin’ Sessions in 1998, a whole record of truck-driving songs, and two more after it. He went to truck driving school around the time his first album came out, got his commercial driver’s licence, and often drives the band’s bus on tour.

What this cab will not do

• Nothing blinks. Every lamp in here is steady: no hazards, no turn signals, nothing that flashes at any setting of the dial, and nothing moves at all.
• No song’s words. Convoy is a story told in CB talk, and it is McCall’s and Davis’s to tell. The rack plays it, and the page quotes none of it.
• No slang that names people unkindly, however much of the list it leaves off.
• Nobody counted. Nobody on a CB ever knew how many were listening, and nobody here does either.