The 2E0VPX Page

Such a versatile and rugged rig. Great mobile and portable, as well as in the shack. The best receiver on 6m of any of my transceivers and great on VHF/UHF too. My back-up rig for nearly 20 years now.

Reasonable condition standard FM radio, with surprisingly good looks and moderate performance. A little quiet on TX at the moment and out on loan.

This one is an oddity in that it was manufactured by an English company, Electro Medical Supplies Ltd of Wantage, a company which had been in existence since 1924 and, indeed, is still in existence (here).

Quite what made the company, which made medical devices, branch out into CB radio is anybody’s guess, but they produced a very British looking radio (always a good thing) with excellent build quality. Open the unit up and instead of the usual tangle of multi-coloured ways, you have a very tidy and well built circuit board. Sadly, however, the radio was never as sensitive as its Japanese rivals.

My particular example does RX and TX but will need some work to get it back to its best state.

A lovely radio, in good condition, minus the top part of the facia which I will need to source in order to complete. This is my current radio of choice on UK FM.

This was the first multimode CB I ever owned back in the 1980s. It’s a fantastic radio – one of the best old-style multimodes ever made, in my opinion. I worked all sorts of exotic DX on it in the 1980s, including a yellow taxi driver in New York and a fisherman on Lake Kenyatta. It was this radio that really introduced me to the thrill of DX chasing and which, ultimately, convinced me to apply for an amateur radio licence.

This particular set is a recent re-purchase. It’s in reasonable condition and has the UK 27/81 channels added (an extra clockwise turn to the band selector) which is useful. There were a couple of necessary minor repairs (the coax socket had a poor thread, so I replaced it and the little ‘hi’ channel light had no lens, so I robbed one from an old oscilloscope I had in my junk pile). The set is now working as it should.

My first CB radio, which I purchased new from Dixons and used throughout the 1980s. The Harrier was built around the legendary Cybernet 134 board, as were the Rotel RVC 220, 230 and 240, the York JCB 861, 863 and the CBS 869 (also in my collection), the Binatone 5 star and Speedway, the Fidelity CB2000FM (also in my collection), the Harrier CBHQ (which I owned for a while), the Harvard 420m, Radiomobile CB202, Sapphire X4000, Barracuda HP940, Midland 76-900. SMC Oscar 1, Ford Roadmaster 505 and the Ham Major 3000. It was a popular board and the Harrier was never surpassed, in my experience. I’m so pleased to have it back in my collection.

The first of my recent purchases. Almost new, in its original box with all the ancillaries still in their original wrappers. This is a great little CB radio. Perhaps not the most sensitive receiver but it has a lovely, robust feel to the controls and a good firm click on the channel selector. If you hear me on FM CB, chances are that I will be using the Icom.

This is my most modern and longest serving 11m radio. I bought it second hand around 20 years ago and it has given me great service. I did, at one point, sell it at a rally to raise money for (yes, you guessed it) another radio. The buyer bought it back and claimed that it was faulty, on the basis that it is not currently displaying channel numbers. He wouldn’t accept that this was due to the way that I had programmed it and that he could re-programme it if he wished. I am now very glad that he did, not least because he’d only paid £100 for it and they now go for three times that amount! But more than that, it has a particularly sensitive receiver and delivers punchy audio on the TX side. It’s my go-to transceiver when 11m is open.