Moonraker Micro CB radio

My recent main YouTube video was on the Moonraker Micro CB radio, which is indeed a compact radio, based on an AnyTone chassis as it turned out so has the 10-meter mode and the naughtiness inside, though of course I have no issue putting this set on 10 it does not have SSB capability and being channelised may require a frequency counter to get an idea what channel is associated with which frequency if you want to use it on 10.

The radio came to me with bare ended wires so I fitted a cigarette lighter plug, rated 5A as this is ample for this radio, to be able to plug it in in the car to do tests, the radio seems to do well, and is good when put against a comparable set, which in my case was a PNI Escort HP7120.

When I did the original bench tests on the radio the power levels were reading lower than expected, however later testing showed it was in fact fine.

Both videos are below

73 de M0WNU/26CT730

Small TTI CB radio with included S-Meter coming soon?

It came to my attention from Simon The Wizard's blog that there is a new TTI CB radio coming soon, the TCB-565, I already own a TCB-550 which I use for my CB gateway on the Free Radio Network, and though it's a good and basic radio which is suited to it's role I have found it lacks one useful feature that every other CB radio I own has, an S-meter.

TTI themselves obviously saw this shortcoming too with the TCB-550, TCB-560 and TCB-660 as none of these had an s-meter and introduced the TCB-565.

Normally I don't report on new radios, but this one is noteworthy having an s-meter, and this got me thinking, I could replace the gateway radio with one of these easily enough, provided that like the TCB-550 the internal speaker was plugged into the main board as the bottom cover should fit and it should fit into the TCB-550's rig bracket, also if the mic socket uses the same Uniden wiring as the 550 the interface would just simply swap over, should this happen then the TCB-550 will be re-purposed as just another rig.

From what pictures I have seen the radio does look good and the s-meter is in a prominent place above the channel display, I shall keep my eye on the usual UK CB suppliers and pick one up as soon as it becomes available and go from there.

73 de 26CT730