MovieChat Forums > Survivors (1975) Discussion > Why didn't they use CB Radio's?

Why didn't they use CB Radio's?

posted 11 years ago by skelk
5 replies | jump to latest

The schoolmaster and the London group were the only ones I really noticed using HAM/CB radios in this series. Rather than waste time on the 4pm call at the mast why didn't they just collect together a bunch of HAM equipment? They could have at the very least acquired the equipment from a bunch of taxi cabs with the central base. With this they could have covered a really nice area 30sq miles or so for local comms. With decent homebase setup they could have managed a huge radius. They didn't even think about taking the gear from the school on the second trip. Greg could have collected kit together on his travels and dropped them off at each community or at least advised them to find the equipment themselves and join a certain frequency to communicate on and they could pass messages up and down the country with ease.

I suppose the telephone mast comms were at least secure in the sense that no one else had thought of it but this could have easily been solved through means of certain key phrases and codes or something mundane that wouldn't alert suspicion.

[–] raf-33 10 years ago

Lol, in answer to both your threads I'd find it easier to get a gun than a CB radio, I've only ever seen them on TV in American big rigs.

Opinions are just onions with pi in them.

[–] Unicorn-9 10 years ago

CB radio wasn't available legally in the UK until the early 80s, so it wouldn't have appeared in a 1970s show. I never saw a CB radio there myself--probably because the UK government deliberately made them incompatible with the rest of the world, so you couldn't just buy cheap, mass-produced US hardware--and even ham gear would probably have required them hunting down specialist radio stores and figuring out how to use it.

Good point about taxis, though. There must be some kind of radio gear they could have scavenged from civil users like that.

[–] fmvd2000 9 years ago

In my minds eye the reason Abby went to London was because she heard of a boy from Peter's school there and that was Max the Radio operator who had been in the Ham Radio club the school master oganized

[–] paulbeardsley 9 years ago

Good point. It's not actually that difficult to make a two way radio from available components. I suppose in the beginning they were concentrating on immediate survival, and later it was too dangerous to enter cities, which is where they would expect to find kit.

That's the clock done, now for the chairs.

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

Surprised that nobody has answered this with a better reason.

CB radio was/is an American thing.

Following 2 world wars and then the cold war the British government tightly controlled communications and broadcasting.

Oswald Mosley a British fascist had wanted to run a propaganda station from outside the UK in the 1930s.

Amateur radio enthusiasts were allowed in Britain but they were licenced by the government and had to pass an exam and obey the rules about wavebands and so,the school club would be a legal licenced organisation.
So no CB radios in the 1970s and few radio hams (as they were called,don't know why.