CB radio with SSB

c.barrett said:

Okay, I'm hoping someone can answer this for me. Has anyone seen the new CB radios with SSB mode? First, I completely understand the CB is useless on a boat....unless you want to talk to truckers from the dock, because it operates on AM and is Citizens Band. But, this one has SSB mode. The unit I am looking at is the Uniden Bearcat 980 SSB CB radio with SSB.

My use for SSB does not include fax or email or anything fancy. Just being able to hail vessels outside of the range of my VHF, or listening to weather forcasts offshore. Perhaps this is only a SSB reciever and not transmitter. I honestly don't know enough about radios in general to answer the question for myself. I do know that I won't be sailing far offshore often enough for long enough to require me to spend the 2500 on an ICOM unit with bells, whistles, and installation. I also probably don't require the full 26 mghz (or whatever), flux copacitor required for time travel, pactor modems, and any other stuff. Like I said, just better comm range, and weather offshore.

Any help or explanation would be helpful. Or even better, maybe they are making VHF marine radios with the SSB option and I don't realize it. Thanks everyone, I read from this website almost everyday, but this is my first time posting. Cheers!

Click to expand...

everyone has given good advice, but you mentioned "flux capacitor" which reminded me of a story that makes me LOL just thinking about it. I work in RF communications and have for almost 30 years. We ( at work) were planning a big modification and were having regular meetings with equipment manufacturer's design engineers and our engineers, etc. We would meet in a conference room shared by other supporting groups. One of those groups had created a basic circuit to fix some small issue and drew the schematic on an easel. Well, it seemed every time I went to the room, someone had added a random electronic component to the schematic drawing. It was some kind of joke , but looked impressive. Anyway, we're in the meeting with manufacturer which consisted of 4-5 engineers from Europe and Pakistan. I started flipping pages on the easel; to get to a clean sheet and my manager, an EE himself, said "wait, what was that circuit?" So, I flipped it back and said " this is just something we're working on here, and when we figure it out, we're all gonna be out the door." so he replied, " Let me take a look at that, You know I used to be a component man at Motorola, blah, blah, blah..." He starts recognizing some of the components and then he gets to one that he can't figure out. He asked "what's that thing in the middle?" I replied " That's a flux capacitor" The foreign engineers chuckled. he says " Flux capacitor?, is that a coil and capacitor in one package? What does it do?" I replied "It's what makes time travel possible". We all laughed, except for him. That was 20 years ago and I still work with a couple of guys that were there and we still reminisce and laugh about that. I wonder if there's a few engineers in Pakistan laughing too.

I think it must have looked like this: