FreeBanding is essentially operating a radio transceiver (transmitter/receiver) on frequencies that you are not licensed to use.

The frequency allocations around 26-27Mhz (the CB Radio bands), are probably the best known FreeBanding area’s. The (UK) legal bands that can be used are from 26.960 – 27.410 MHz, and 27.596 – 27.996 MHz, with both area’s having 40 channelised frequencies.

However, a brief listen around 27.555Mhz USB will soon reveal activity from all over the world when conditions are good. Most operators on this band have call-signs which are made up of a number, some letters and some more numbers. These are often devised to emulate the call signs originally issued to the Alfa Tango (Italian DX group) club members. Most of the equipment used on this band is amateur radio equipment which has been “opened up” (modified to transmit on frequencies other than amateur bands), although it is still common to hear stations using CB radio’s such as Cobra, Superstar and Ham International.

Freebanding on 26-27Mhz is not where it ends though. Slightly higher up is the 29.7 – 30Mhz area. This has a military/aeronautical allocation in Europe, and some Civil/PMR allocation in the USA. Generally it is very quiet in the UK, but some SSB signals have been heard around 29.8 – 29.85MHz. Again these frequencies can be reached on 10Metre radio’s such as Uniden 2830/President Lincoln series and on opened up amateur equipment. Call-signs heard have been as the previously mentioned numbers/letters/numbers pattern. This band shows very similar propagation to the 26 – 27Mhz band.

If you wish to move further down the HF spectrum, another very popular freeband area is from 6.6 – 6.7Mhz. Known as “45Meters or Echo Charlie (by older operators), this band exhibits very similar propagation to the 40 metre amateur band with mainly UK only stations in the daytime, but opening up to Europe and beyond at night. The European allocation is aeronautical, although it is believed that there is some military traffic is this area too. Generally most activity seems to be around 6.670Mhz SSB, with neither sideband being preferred. In years gone by, before the proliferation of easily modified amateur equipment, the majority of radio’s heard on this band were ex-military such as the no19 set. At one time there was a transverter commercially available from a (believed to be Italian)company called CTVR, which used an SSB CB set as driver.

Even further down the band is the 1.7-1.8MHz area. Generally populated with one side of cordless phones convesations and some marine mobile comms. Again more popular in days gone by with operators using ex-military valve radio’s. Interestingly, most of the comms was AM based because the available equipment was either AM or CW modes only.

There are VHF/UHF area’s where freebanding has been heard. Many years ago when CB was getting popular in the UK, there was a glut of cheap walkie-talkies that worked on 49.86MHz. These were illegal to use in the UK and were on a license free allocation in the USA. Since then, there has been a low-power licence free allocation in the UK/Europe around this area (49.8-49.9Mhz) and there are various services from paging to baby alarms to be found here. There have also been some higher power FM & SSB signals heard on here, ranging from modified CB sets to amateur radio equipment.

This band also used to be used by the high power (but still illegal) cordless phones that were imported from Europe/USA. Nowadays there is only one side of the conversation to be found in this band, with the return leg found in the 1.6-1.8MHz area. Also around these frequencies, the previously mentioned company CTVR produced some radios that worked on 46MHz and were sold as a PMR style piece of kit.

The most common freeband area on UHF is the PMR446 allocation. This consists of 8 channels of FM only and DCS & CTCSS squelch. I wont go into any more details regarding this as I will be providing an article on PMR 446 later.

Thats all for now, please leave a comment, and if there is anything you would like to know about the topic, feel free to mail me on alan@26fb806.net.

Well here it is. I’ve been promising myself the indulgance of a website for a long time, and I’ve finally found time to create one. I do like working for myself, but it does tend to limit the amount of time I have at home to get these things done.

Being on the road quite a lot limits the amount of time I have to play radio with my base setup too…. so most of my operating is done whilst mobile. I’ve read a lot of different opinions on whether operating mobile is safe or not, and I think that the responsible operator can do both without risking himself or anyone else on the road. Okay, so some out there will disagree with me…… its a free world…. but in 30 years of operating mobile, some as passenger but most as driver, I don’t believe that my operating whilst on the move has ever caused any harm. There are a lot of poor drivers out on the roads, and operating whilst on the move or not isn’t going to change that…. they will still be poor drivers!!! Also, SPEED DOESN’T KILL….. its P*SS POOR DRIVING that kills…. but that’s a rant for another time……

So, if you’ve read past the above and got to here, thanks for sticking with it… I do sometimes go off on one!!. Anyway, I’m hoping to put some useful info on here, obviously radio related, and some of it will be technical and some won’t. Quite a lot will be related to my own experiences on the air, either listening or otherwise, and there will be some downloadables for you (got to create them first, so if you have any idea’s, please mail me and I will see what I can come up with).

Seriously though, I do have quite a lot of radio related info here at Mission Control, so if there is anything you need or could find useful, drop me a line at: alan@26fb806.net, and I will either post it here or mail it back to you.

So, that’s it for the first post. Please bear with me, the site will go through quite a few changes before I settle on the theme that I like (and whilst I get used to how WordPress works!!), but I will try to make it as user-friendly as I can whilst doing this.

Please feel free to leave me a comment to let me know how I’m getting on!

Alan.