by Barry Manz, Editor
If you’re as old as I am you have a vivid impression of CB radio, the lexicon of 10-codes and handle names, the cultural moment in the mid-1970s when “10-4, good buddy” entered the national vocabulary and antennas sprouted from the rooflines of suburban Chevrolets coast to coast. What most people do not know is that CB radio never actually went away. It retreated, certainly, and it shed its pop-culture status entirely. But the technology itself has continued quietly functioning, and the people who depend on it never stopped.
The Rise and the Crash
To understand where CB radio stands today, it helps to remember why it exploded when it did. The origins of the service trace back to the 1940s, when the FCC reserved a set of frequencies for short-range personal communication — a no-license, no-test alternative to amateur radio. For decades, it remained a niche hobby, but then came the 1973 oil crisis, and Richard Nixon said everybody now needed to drive 55 miles an hour.
The nationwide speed limit gave truckers both a grievance and a motivation to communicate, and CB radio let them share information about road conditions, scale stations, and the location of speed traps. The technology spread rapidly through the trucking community, and from there into the broader culture. By the mid-1970s, CB had become genuinely fashionable — a grassroots communications medium that predated the internet’s democratizing promise by two decades. Hollywood noticed quickly: Smokey and the Bandit, released in 1977, turned CB chatter and trucker slang into a box-office phenomenon, and the film’s success did as much as anything to plant the technology firmly in the public imagination.
But the same thing that made CB radio popular also killed its cultural moment. When millions of hobbyists flooded a finite number of frequencies, the utility that had made the medium attractive degraded, and the 40-channel band became congested and chaotic. As the novelty wore off and the signal-to-noise ratio on the airwaves worsened, the casual users who had bought in for the experience quietly moved on. By the early 1980s, the CB craze was effectively over, not because the technology had failed, but because the cultural conditions that had inflated its appeal were gone.
Quiet Persistence
What remained after the hobbyists departed was a core user base that had always valued CB radio for functional rather than social reasons. Long-haul truckers stayed. Off-road and four-wheel-drive communities stayed. Rural users in areas with thin or nonexistent cellular coverage stayed. Construction sites and agricultural operations stayed. These were not sentimental holdouts clinging to an outdated technology out of nostalgia. They were people for whom CB radio solved a real problem that no other widely available, license-free technology had yet solved: reliable, short-range voice communication that required no infrastructure and no subscription.
The market today reflects this base. By one estimate, the global CB radio market was valued at roughly $192 million in 2023, with projections suggesting modest but steady growth through the early 2030s. These are not the numbers of a dying technology. They are the numbers of a mature, specialized one — a market that has shed its speculative premium and settled into its actual utility.
Within that base, single sideband operation has long occupied a category of its own. SSB — which suppresses the carrier and one sideband to concentrate all available transmitter power into a single sideband — effectively doubles the usable range of a CB installation compared to standard AM, while also cutting through interference more cleanly.
Upper- and lower-sideband operation is available on a subset of CB radios, and users who gravitate toward it tend to be the most serious and experienced operators on the band: long-distance communicators, marine users, and those who need reliable contact across terrain where standard AM range falls short. SSB has never been a mass-market feature — it requires more attention to operate, and the radio itself costs more — but its continued presence in the product lines of manufacturers like Cobra, Uniden, and President is a reliable indicator that the serious end of the CB market is still very much active.
New Life in the Margins
Something else has happened in recent years that deserves attention: CB radio has quietly begun to modernize. In 2023, the FCC approved CB operation on FM channels alongside the traditional AM band — a change that manufacturers quickly adopted, releasing a new generation of radios supporting both modes. FM offers cleaner audio with less static at the cost of some range, and its addition to the CB band is the kind of incremental but meaningful upgrade the service hadn’t seen in years.
Meanwhile, newer CB units have incorporated Bluetooth connectivity, digital displays, and NOAA weather alert integration. These are not radical departures from the technology’s character, but they represent a recognition that CB radio’s surviving user base is not frozen in 1976. The people buying CB equipment today are often also running smartphones and GPS units, and they expect their gear to be compatible with the rest of their communications ecosystem.
There is also a growing interest in CB and related radio technologies driven by preparedness concerns. The increasing frequency of events — severe weather, wildfires, infrastructure failures — that can knock out cellular networks has prompted a renewed look at communication technologies that do not depend on towers, satellites, or power grids. CB radio, along with GMRS and amateur radio, has benefited from this interest. For the person who drives along a stretch of rural highway where a cell signal is a theoretical concept rather than a practical reality, a CB radio on the dashboard remains the most reliable option.
The Lesson Worth Drawing
The story of CB radio’s cultural disappearance despite its continued functional existence says something notable. We live in an era that is acutely attentive to the emergence of new technologies and almost entirely inattentive to the persistence of old ones. A technology that does not generate press releases, venture investment, or breathless coverage tends to vanish from awareness even when it has not vanished from use.
CB radio has not been replaced; it’s just been overlooked. The technologies that were supposed to make it obsolete — cellular networks, digital two-way radios, satellite communications — serve overlapping but not identical needs. Each has failure modes, cost structures, and coverage limitations that CB does not share. A system that operates at 27 MHz, requires no subscription, works when the grid is down, and can be installed in a vehicle for under $100 occupies a genuine niche that no amount of app development has eliminated.
The 40 channels are still there, and Channel 9 is still monitored for emergencies. Channel 19 still carries the conversations of truckers working the interstates. The antennas are less visible than they once were, but they are there. The technology survived its own fame, which is more than most fads can say.