WA Radio Scanner Users' Group

The maximum legal power that a CB radio can transmit is 5 watts. So if you get one of those, however far it gets is however far it gets.

As Robbage says, a handheld "walkie talkie" style radio with a little antenna on it won't get the same performance as a "base station" type with a good quality antenna on the roof of your house. But of course, to get that kind of performance, you're going to have to pay for it.

Just to pick two items as an example - a GME TX3100 radio with the full legal 5W output power will set you back around $250-$300. Then if you want a high-gain antenna for the roof of your house such as a GME AE4110 would be another $300 or so.

A lot of coin that's for sure, but those are the kinds of costs you need for that kind of performance.

Zebedee wrote:The maximum legal power that a CB radio can transmit is 5 watts. So if you get one of those, however far it gets is however far it gets.

As Robbage says, a handheld "walkie talkie" style radio with a little antenna on it won't get the same performance as a "base station" type with a good quality antenna on the roof of your house. But of course, to get that kind of performance, you're going to have to pay for it.

Just to pick two items as an example - a GME TX3100 radio with the full legal 5W output power will set you back around $250-$300. Then if you want a high-gain antenna for the roof of your house such as a GME AE4110 would be another $300 or so.

A lot of coin that's for sure, but those are the kinds of costs you need for that kind of performance.

well are there any legal 5W handhelds ? and do you know any good antennas for a handheld?

danoroth wrote:well are there any legal 5W handhelds ? and do you know any good antennas for a handheld?

There's heaps of handheld UHF CBs. A lot of them only run 1 or 2 watts to save battery power. But there's still some, like this one for example that lets you switch between 1W and 5W output power. You can buy that radio locally from this company, based in Malaga.

That radio has a built-in antenna that can be removed (not all of them can, some radios have the antenna fixed to the unit so you're stuck with whatever they've supplied). You could set up a system at home where you put a good quality CB antenna on the roof, run a cable down the wall and into the house and terminate it on the right kind of connector for that radio. Then when you're at home you could plug the roof antenna into the radio, but still be able to disconnect it, plug in the supplied antenna and go portable.

From a previous post, an example of an antenna you could put on the roof would be this one. It costs around $279 not including postage from here. You'd then need some cable and some connectors - an N-type connector to attach to the base of the radio and a TNC connector to attach to the handheld radio. Figure about $5 each for the connectors and around $5 per metre for the cable. Altronics sells RG213 cable for $3.80 per metre. What I'd probably do if it were me would be to run RG213 cable from the roof antenna to a wall plate in the room you want to use the radio from, then run the thinner and easier to work with RG58 cable as a fly lead from that wall socket to the radio. Altronics would probably sell all the bits and pieces you'd need to do it yourself.

The TX6100 also has a removeable antenna and is 5w.

robbage wrote:The TX6100 also has a removeable antenna and is 5w.

I nearly linked to that one as well, but it's only the 40 channel version. I figured if he was buying something new, at least go for the new 80 channel standard

Eh? All of our TX6100s are 80 chan. That was a condition of buying them.

robbage wrote:Eh? All of our TX6100s are 80 chan. That was a condition of buying them.

Bizarre. The manual on GME's website says they're only 40 channel jobbies...

There must be a "revision 2" of the hardware but they didn't bother to revise the manual on the website

That's more than likely. Probably just required a quick flash in the factory.