Back in the late 1970’s, everybody seemed to have a CB radio in the car. There were radio shows and even movies made around plots featuring CB radio communications. Now they have vanished (cell phones are better and easier to use).
Bt why aren’t they in yard sales/junk shops? I go to quite a few yardsales, and I never see them.
So where did millions of these things wind up-were they all discarded?
There’s one in my basement.
A lot of CB’s were left in cars that got sold. Eventually they went to the junkyard and crushed along with the 8 track tape player.
My parents had two cb’s in cars and a base station in the house. Dad was stationed at a air base in Louisiana and drove home weekends. He’d call us on the cb during the 220 mile trip.
Not much help at all on the big picture, but I only had one in a customized van. The CB came with it and I rarely used the CB. It went with the van when I traded it in for a Jeep Cherokee in the 90’s. No CB in the Jeep. I doubt if I had more than an hour’s total usage out of the van CB.
At the height of popularity it was hard finding an open channel. We’d monitor one channel and dad would call in. Then switch to an open channel to talk. Sometime you’d have to try several before finding an open one.
It was fun on trips to call other cars or trucks you’d see on the road. You could get speed trap warnings, or find a good restaurant up ahead. I recall stopping for dinner with cars we met on long trips.
Is this actually true?
You seem to think they serve the same purpose, but they don’t. A CB only works with other people within a certain range who are also on the same frequency. Actually, a CB is just a very powerful walkie talkie with multiple channels.
I was just an infant, but I don’t recall every car in the 70s with a CB, and the only people you see using them in old movies or TV shows were truck drivers.
Cars with cb’s usually had their call letters in the back window or on the trunk. I don’t know how many were installed, but it was a lot. In college I had a portable one for emergency’s. It was in a plastic case with a cigarette lighter connection. I kept it under the front seat for years. The cops monitored a channel and would send help.
They went 10-7. 
Seriously, I was into CBing in a big way in the 70s and met a lot of people in real life off the air. I had a 40 channel SSB base with an amplified mike and a Starduster antenna. I started to lose interest in the 80s and don’t even remember what happened to that base station.
CB radios were the Twitter of the 70s.
You can all quote me on that!
CB radios were that widespread in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Many a road trip I took then the CB radio was on and used by me all the time. I can recall several trucker convoys I participated in (I was a four-wheeler) to aid in getting from Point A to Point B. At rest stops on long trips practically everyone had a CB; cars, trucks, 18-wheelers.
My father had a CD long before the craze; he used to contact his workers when he or they were on the road. Very useful.
Most likely. I think I may still have one under a bunch of other stuff only an irrational packrat would keep.
I wouldn’t say every car, but they were highly popular. Technology moves on.
They were, indeed, pretty common in the mid-to-late 1970s. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say “Cars with cb’s usually had their call letters in the back window or on the trunk”, as aceplace57 says – I saw that sort of thing very occasionally, but it was pretty rare, at least in my area.
In the late 80s and early 90s, when my wife and I would regularly go on road trips with a group of friends, we all had CBs in our cars (we would often be in “convoys” of 3 to 5 cars), and they were quite useful for discussing rest stops and generally killing time on the road. We still have our old CB sitting in the garage, but it hasn’t been used in at least 15 years, and I have no idea if it still works.
I threw mine out when I got tired of it. I had it in my bedroom, as I was too young to drive at the time. The only time it was actually useful was when my father was going to pick me up to go to the dentist and he was still a couple of miles away.
I found two in my basement last night.
I knew they had disappeared as a fad, but I guess I had been under the mistaken impression that truckers still used them. Is that not the case? If not, how do truckers communicate with each other now (assuming they do)? I mean, you’re not going to know the mobile phone number of the rig in front of you. And who’s gonna tell you about that bear trap at mile 194?
ETA: my grandfather had a base unit in his house and mounted the antenna on a tree outside; he would get signals from states away and talk to truckers all day. His handle was “Maitre D”.
For those of you that had one, what was your handle? I was Rainbow Demon. My father was Kansas Reaper.
AFAIK, they’re still used by many truckers. It’s the usage by non-truckers which was a fad that faded.
The times I long for a CB again are when I’m trapped in a slowdown on the interstate on long trips. A CB can be used then to get info from truckers on the other side of the road- How far before this clears up? Should I take a detour at the next exit or stay on?
A cell phone’s generally useless for such info.
The Map app on my iPhone is usually pretty accurate at showing where congestion starts and stops.