Stryker SR-94HPC 10 Meter Radio instead of CB

pugslyyy

Expedition Vehicle Engineer Guy
Has anyone played around with these (or other AM/FM 10 meter rigs)? I like the feature set and configurability.

SR-94HPC-1.jpg
 

captadv

Spectator
You don't mention it, so in case it's not already known, this is an amateur radio and you'll need your ham license.

If you already knew that, sorry. ;)

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pugslyyy

Expedition Vehicle Engineer Guy
You don't mention it, so in case it's not already known, this is an amateur radio and you'll need your ham license.

If you already knew that, sorry. ;)

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

Used to be that retailers would ask you for your call sign when you ordered radios, I haven't had that happen to me in a long time.
 
I gave some serious thought to a rig like this (a President Lincoln II) a while back. I even bought one to play with it for a while. I've come to the conclusion that a 10 meter mono-band radio really isn't all that useful unless you buy enough of them to outfit your entire group with similar radios.

This radio won't (easily) technically or legally give you coverage on both the CB band and the 10 meter bands for three reasons:
  1. It isn't legal to mod the 10 meter ham radio to work on CB due to FCC regulations on how CB is licensed. There isn't a way around that one. Some people don't care. It's up to you to decide if you want to be legal. I personally like to keep my radio gear legal so to not annoy other radio operators.

  2. Even if you do illegally mod the radio to cover CB, the same antenna won't work on 29.6 Mhz (10 meter FM simplex channel) and also work on 27.005 Mhz (CB channel 4) as shortened vehicle mountable antennas don't have enough bandwidth to give you a reasonable SWR on a 3 Mhz wide swath. You could use multiple antennas($25+space), an adjustable screwdriver antenna ($500+), or an antenna tuner ($100+) to get around this.

  3. This one is a little technical... Transmit bandwidth is the measure of how 'wide' your radio signal is. The number on the face of your radio is the 'center' of where the transmitted signal will be on an AM or FM mode. The signal emitted by your radio uses all frequencies plus in the range of the dial frequency plus or minus 1/2 of the transmit bandwidth. The only transmit bandwidth on CB is 1.8Khz on AM. The standard transmit bandwidth on AM on ham radio is 2.4Khz. A standard CB radio receiving a 1.8 Khz wide signal will receive garbled audio if it receives a signal transmitted with a 2.4Khz bandwidth (it's 33% too wide). You may be able to reduce the transmit bandwidth on your 10 meter rig by modding something in the board to lower it to 1.8Khz, but then a ham radio operator will need to know to similarly adjust his bandwidth down by a third on the other end. More expensive ham radios can adjust both the RX and TX bandwidth in the software options in the radio. No approved CB radio can adjust the RX or TX bandwidth as the FCC does not allow this as an option on that radio service. You can hear the same garbling of audio if you listen to CB channel 6 when the guys with incorrectly filtered 10 Kilowatt amplifiers are transmitting. Their amplifiers do not filter off the edges of the signal, so it makes the amplified signal too wide. That makes it very difficult to impossible to understand what they are saying. Some people ignore this issue and run 10 meter radios on CB, but the resulting signal means that only other people with 10 meters radios modded to run on CB can understand what they are saying. The vast swath of people with bog-standard CBs just hear a fuzzy buzzing noise when the folks with the modded radios key up. I've tested this using an attenuation board that allows you to plug the antenna connector of one radio into the antenna connector of another radio through the coax line without needing to transmit anything over the air. It took me a while to figure out why the "receiving" radio was getting a buzzing nose instead of good audio.

You would at least need a second antenna and modding the radio's frequency limits and transmit bandwidth to get your 10 meter rig to work on the CB band from a technical standpoint. You would also need to be OK with the idea that you are operating an unliscensed radio in violation of FCC rules for the CB band.

This means, to me, that I still need a dedicated CB installed in the vehicle.

On the ham radio side, we are near the solar minimum, so 10 meters isn't open very often right now. Even when 10 meters is open, everyone else also believes that it isn't open so they are not listening to it. AM and FM modulation isn't used very often on the ham bands for long distance, it's mostly SSB.

Those things mean a unmodified 10 meter only rig gives you local comms on a band that not many people use for local comms, or a modified-for-CB 10 meter radio will only give you local comms on CB and a strange transmit bandwith on a little used modulation on a rarely open band on ham.

My personal setup was to be the 'radio guy' in the group, and I just like playing with radios. I outfitted the Jeep with a 2m/70cm ham for local comms, a CB with a QD antenna, and a 40m-6m HF ham radio with a 133 foot long wire antenna and tripod in a bag to set up for NVIS (100-300miles) coverage as a 'call for help'/'play with in camp' radio.

I've found that the CB antenna is just too long and bangs on things, so I only break it out I'm in a place like the desert where the length of the antenna does not matter. Honestly, I've never been in a group where I needed the CB. A handheld 2m/70cm radio can be had cheaper then a CB these days, and a dead rabbit can pass the tech exam. I've seen many rigs with $35 Baofengs as their only comms bungee corded to something to make sure the radio does not fly around in the cabin.

A 10 meter only rig isn't all useless though...

I believe an unmodified radio could be quite useful if you have a group of 3-4 rigs that you want to make sure have clear channels between each other even as you go through cities. You'll have to get everyone to agree to buy the same band radio for this to work. The 'standard' 2meter and 70cm bands are getting busy, so when using those bands you have to be OK with changing frequencies to backup ones as you encounter other users during a road trip. The 10 meter band is empty enough that it's unlikely you'll encounter another AM user if you keep to really low power even while driving through major cities.

A niche use case where 10 meters is awesome is a very distributed (miles apart) group in a hilly forest. The 10 meter band groundwave goes around bends in the Earth and trees better then 2 meters or 6 meters, so you can get good distance even in a forest, A 2 meter signal would crap out at a mildly shorter distance. You can use an antenna calculator to see the difference. I've usually seen that I would get 10%-20% more distance if both sides of the conversation is in 10 meters vs 2 meters with both vehicles at the same location and both vehicles having the antennas at the same height between the two services. The reason it's a niche use case is that practically nobody monitors 10 meter simplex from their 4x4 unless they know ahead of time that they should buy the gear so that they can do it.
 
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pugslyyy

Expedition Vehicle Engineer Guy
Yeah, I have one under the CRT brand that I imported from the Neatherlands. It apparently has the best feature set amongst all the radios that share this same design. For less than $100 shipped to my door it should make a good CB.

http://www.crtfrance.com/en/mobiles-radio/640-crt-2000.html

I've been using mine for about a week now (and 2000 miles of driving) and am quite pleased with the way it has been performing. I do like the concept of being able to reconfigure it for different locales if traveling internationally.
 

reidbailey

Observer
I've been using mine for about a week now (and 2000 miles of driving) and am quite pleased with the way it has been performing. I do like the concept of being able to reconfigure it for different locales if traveling internationally.

That's good to hear!


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paranoid56

Adventurer
for you that use it for CB, how did you mod it to do that? looking on youtube gets me all kinds of crap, but only one that actually talked about it was something about clipping the white wire lol
 

Broko

New member
Used to be that retailers would ask you for your call sign when you ordered radios, I haven't had that happen to me in a long time.

Just because retailers don't ask for your license, does not make it legal for you to do what you are wanting to do. Just sayin


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pugslyyy

Expedition Vehicle Engineer Guy
for you that use it for CB, how did you mod it to do that? looking on youtube gets me all kinds of crap, but only one that actually talked about it was something about clipping the white wire lol
You just clip the white wire to open up the different country modes. Super simple.

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