Becoming Citizens of the 11 Metre Band

A companion text to audio work ​No 'Go-go Girls (on the Dancefloor)'

In many parts of the world, a narrow band of radio frequencies are reserved for free and unlicensed public use. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA established the Citizens Radio Service in 1945, so that personal or small business communications could take place locally. The most commonly allocated frequency range, around 27MHz, is also known as the 11m band - one full cycle of its wavelength stretches 11 metres, but is restricted by power, thereby amplitude and reach, though radio is ultimately transnational and often leaky. Transmissions can travel as far as open space (buildings may interfere with the signal) and the power limit allows. Relays of radio signal to extend reach, both online and physical, are forbidden. 
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Coincidentally, every eleven years the solar cycle distorts and emphasises the reach of this band. As we are currently experiencing the height of this cycle, little low power transmissions on 27MHz have a higher tendency to travel greater distances, bouncing off the layer of charged particles in the Earth’s upper atmosphere called the ionosphere in a phenomenon known as skywave propagation. This tendency for long distance travel makes the Citizens Band dense not only with intentional local traffic but also contemporaneous interjections from far flung locations. An eleven-year season of communication choirs gather on the Fata Morgana of the radio horizon.​

Alright, let’s see… twist the antenna extender onto the cb, just a half-turn, same thing for the antenna onto the base. Where should I put this? I need metal, and people keep saying to go outside… righto, out to the garden, and let’s use this iron (?) plant shelf thing. Turn the knob, annnnddd we’re on!

Kkkkrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh
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Ok, make sure it’s on HI, and let’s start with UK fm. Channels 9 and 40 are the hot ones, right?

Kkkkrrrrrghhhhhhh gghhgghhghh……… fffsssshhh khkhkhkhkhkhhhh
Hmmm let’s keep looking.

Static, nothing, different nothing, more static, static with a slightly different texture. Trying the Euro channels… is that legal from the UK?? I can listen, right?

Kkrrrrrrrrrrppkkppkkppkkppkk ooh that’s fun.

Silence! What does silence mean?

Static forever 🙂

I wonder if this antenna becomes ground as well if I stick it on a radiator… back inside, let’s go sit and leave this thing on.

*9 hours of static later*

It’s just turned itself off lol. But the battery is still half-full! That’s kind of impressive. Trying again tomorrow…

The ionosphere is composed of layers— D, E, and F—which form and dissolve according to solar radiation, time of day, season, and atmospheric conditions. During daylight hours the lower D-layer absorbs lower-frequency radio waves, limiting long-distance transmission, while largely disappearing at night. Above it, the E-layer (around 90–150km altitude) can refract higher-frequency signals, sometimes enabling medium-range communication during the day. Under certain conditions—often in late spring and summer, but occasionally in winter—the E-layer forms dense, patchy regions of ionisation called ‘sporadic E’. These unpredictable clouds can briefly reflect signals at high frequencies, including the Citizens Band, allowing transmissions to leap hundreds or thousands of miles. Higher still, the F-layer enables the longest-distance radio propagation, particularly at night and during periods of high solar activity. Together, these shifting layers create a temporal and seasonal architecture for radio: one in which weather patterns, solar radiation, and diurnal cycles modulate who can hear whom, and from where.

There’s a decommissioned coal mine in Essen, Germany, now a UNESCO heritage site on account of its modernist architecture. To me, it looks like something from a Dziga Vertov film - a rust-colour symbol of man’s victory over Earth. Maybe others see it differently. Walkways are suspended in the air, perhaps shafts that coal travelled along. I’ve climbed a fire escape for a neighbouring building, a silver spiral stairwell, to get a good view. From this position, I can see an expansive flat. I’ve pulled out my CB radio and attached the antenna extender to the metal banner of the staircase.

At first: noise. Loud, abrasive static. And then, voices - a man says ‘Baltimore, Maryland’. Did I hear this right? ‘Baltimore, Maryland’ he repeats. He’s having a conversation with someone but I can only hear one side. Then there’s another voice - is this his interlocutor, or a third joining the chat? ‘California’ Did I hear this right? Distinctly North American accents, male for sure. What else are they saying? It’s hard to pick out and to follow the thread, and anyhow, I’m too excited to hear this distance to concentrate. 

How is it that I can hear people in the US from my fire escape in Ruhr? Baltimore to Essen is 3,980 miles. I’m on EU channel 28, AM. I know AM transmissions travel further than FM. Channel 28 is part of the High Frequency band, whose waves can reflect off the ionosphere. But this is usually strongest at night, and it’s 2pm here. It’s December - midday in winter means the sun is low, but the ionosphere is still being ionized by solar radiation. The ionosphere, a layer in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, has its own layers - D, E and F. The E-layer’s ionization is strongest during daylight, and, apparently, can create ‘sporadic-E’ reflections - short-lived ionized clouds that can bounce radio signals thousands of miles. 

A moment of doubt - is it possible that I am so lucky as to catch a random electromagnetic cloud at this particular moment? For all these circumstances to align for this one moment of listening? I will press record so that I can listen later and make sure I’m not dreaming. The sound is very crunchy after all. Maybe I can hear them clearer if I fiddle with the settings? But then I might lose them. Not worth the risk. I wonder if they would be able to hear me, as I can hear them, but feel it somehow impolite to broadcast to alert them to my presence. In any case - what would I say?

In the 1990s, regulators granted less interference-prone, more neighbourhood-travelling wavelengths for free citizen use. The Family Radio Service (FRS) (462 and 467MHz) was granted by the FCC in 1996 in the USA allowing for long distance walkie talkies, baby monitors and cordless telephones without so many chances for accidental interjection. On these frequencies people are sending voices, morse code, data packets. In advanced receivers ‘selective calling’ can allow that only certain tones turn on a receiver. But a spoken voice on the frequency range can hit these coded tones, unintentionally opening a receiving door, a ‘talk-off’, a song that opens sesame. 

In 1997 the European Radio Communications committee granted the Private Mobile Radio (PMR) frequencies 446MHz for license-free use in Europe, Singapore, and Malaysia. Yet FRS frequencies are illegal for unlicensed transmitters in Europe, and the PMR frequencies are illegal for unlicensed transmission in Australia, USA, and Canada, as the frequencies for emergency services, licensed amateur operators and military radar systems occupy the otherwise ‘free’ frequencies in the alternate territories. This lack of overlap limits possibilities for citizens to use these peak solar conditions to connect with each other globally and experiment with possibilities for free and unlicensed long-distance communications. Such national regulatory boundaries constrain what might otherwise be a truly planetary low-power communication ecology, where citizens harness solar conditions and bypass the technologies of major corporations to communicate as they choose. ​

I’m thinking about the term citizen band in itself - because you don’t need to be a citizen to use this. You could have any sort of background, any legal status, you could be stateless, you could be a citizen of someplace else, it doesn’t matter! You can still pick up one of these radios and use it. So why is it called Citizens Band? I understand that it’s ‘citizen’ as opposed to say ‘military personnel’ or military channels, but it still feels strange - as though you have to be a certain type of person to use this radio. I wonder… 

As a local, accessible, mobile technology, a primary user group of Citizens Band radio has been distance drivers. Truckers have long used CB to share information: famously during the 1974 oil crisis in the United States, when the network was alive with reports of which gas stations could offer a full tank with the shortest queue (Watts & Barton, 2011, p.395). Truckers were not, however, the only drivers to use CB radio: fishermen and farmers also found it useful in their vehicles. Gendered advertising in the 1950s advised women to keep a set in their car for safety - alongside a male mannequin installed in the passenger seat, apparently necessary to ward off carjackers (Lane, 1955). 

Despite broader uptake, CB radio culture has been dominated by male voices. Female-presenting voices are rare on CB radio, just as they are on amateur radio bands (Engelmann, 2021). Where amateur radio has formalised gendered codes in its slanguage—‘OM’ or ‘old man’ signifying a male operator (regardless of age), and ‘YL’ or ‘young lady’ denoting a female operator—CB slang is more explicitly sexualised and derogatory. Some of these terms appear in the book Official CB Dictionary (Book Craft Guild, 1976), falsely marketed as ‘Required by Law to be kept with CB set’. Women are referred to as ‘mares’, ‘beavers’, ‘mini skirts’, ‘muffs’, or ‘seat covers’; female police officers are rated as ‘Mama Bear’, ‘Honey Bear’ or ‘Miss Piggy’; and young female hitchhikers are dubbed ‘jailbait’. CB radio users choose nicknames, or ‘handles,’ which further reflect a macho culture: as anthropologist J. Jerome Smith observed, ‘men project virility, while women collectively refrain from any significant degree of gender marking’ (1981). ​

Parked on the side of the main road leading to Chania International Airport, just before the prohibition zone where you can also find loads of big trucks stationed by the nearby coffee shops. Testing EU FM and EU AM channels by attaching the antenna on my car (driving and stationed), on metallic garage doors and trash bins.

As I am operating my CB transceiver many truck drivers pass by looking at me. I wonder, if they understand what I am doing and if they had their CB on, how would they notify their peers about me on CH19? What slang would they use? Miss Piggy, 50 or 25 or Gringhella? Or perhaps a good-buddy or deadkey on the road? 10-20-100m before airport turn? Roger? I switch to CH19 in case I can listen-in and perhaps connect with a BREAKER-BREAKER ONE-NINE! And also share my handle: TRIPLEA2M. I learned that a handle must be something very personal and so I did. The channel is empty… no chat, no conversation, no noise. QRT.

Further down, I see a huge truck (a digger or a road roller or something similar), parked with noone around to operate it. I attach the antenna on top of one of the big arms of the truck (a cat sitting on the trash bin nearby is looking at me curiously). I stretch the antenna cable across the length of the arm and switch the CB transceiver on. I scan EU FM channels, I pick a recurring harsh noise on EU FM CH15 as if a conversation is happening but I cannot tune in clearly. I then move to EU AM mode, same Channel and I can hear clearly voices, a woman and one (or two) men talking in a Slavic language. ‘Niet’ is repeated. I make an effort to communicate: ‘BREAKER - BREAKER…’ no response, no pause. I make the observation that perhaps they cannot listen to me. My device and antenna are not strong enough. I am a small noise and interference to them.

The narrative of CB radio as a white, male, trucker-centric space obscures the fact that many other communities also used the medium. In the 1970s, CB radio proliferated rapidly, and during its early legal availability in France (in the absence of an established dominant user group) women formed a sizable demographic of users (Prévos, 1986). Children joined local CB kids’ groups, and nursing home residents were provided with CB sets to maintain social contact (Bongaro, 1978). A 1977 edition of S9 magazine recounts the story of three female operators—known by their handles ‘Morning Star,’ ‘Soobie Doo,’ and ‘Raggedy Ann’—who raised money to buy CB sets for visually impaired members of their community. British teenagers used CB to make new contacts with whom they exchanged decorative ‘eyeball cards’ (Hogan & Titlow, 2017). Whilst CB was used by some as a channel for exclusionary, gendered speech, for communities operating outside mainstream power structures, it could be a vital means of connection. 

CB radio was not only a tool for leisure or hobbyist communication but also a site where Black communities actively resisted racial violence and developed their own technical cultures. Historian Art M. Blake (2019) describes networks of Black CB users such as the Rooster Channel Jumpers and Deacons for Defense and Justice, organizing against racist violence coordinated via CB radio, including by the Ku Klux Klan. Resistance on the airwaves existed alongside a flourishing technical culture: Blake documents an activity that took over Channel 6 for the skilled technical game of ‘shooting skip’ (Blake, 2011, p.532). Renamed the ‘superbowl,’ this channel became a space for radio operators to compete for long-distance communications, teasing opponents and blocking out their voices in the process. These histories trouble the idea of CB as neutral infrastructure, reframing it as a mutable system continually shaped—and reshaped—by the social relations that flow through it.

My experience of CB so far has been a very lonely business. I wanted to connect, to talk back, to PTT and to join the community. But in every single test, the language was not one I could comprehend and my voice was possibly not heard at all. In one instance, in the first ever test I did with my daughter Antonia out on our balcony, I thought I heard a rushed reaction to my ‘Hello’ and then the channel closed, the conversation stopped suddenly. They probably switched to a different channel to avoid my interference. It still is awe-inspiring to think that with such a simple and direct device (compared i.e. to mobile phones) you can potentially talk to people (wirelessly) from far away and to establish an open meeting point, with its own system of communication. And yet, I now begin to question its openness as it feels an exclusive form of communication, a gated community, mainly man-centered. But hey, here I am to prove me wrong. Hoping to explore this a bit more in the future with Shortwave Collective. We can make our own open, inclusive, safe and always listening-out (for breakers) community. One CB poem at a time. A Shortwave Collective CB Poetry Club! All Welcome!

For us, working with CB has been a practice of tuning, listening, and staying with uncertainty. We have engaged with urban environments in new ways: scouting our localities for large metal surfaces to magnetically mount our antenna extenders, conducting coordinated tests in an attempt to ‘meet’ on an 11 metre wave. Although citizenship of the band is nominally open, none of us experienced a sense of belonging. We heard predominantly male voices and encountered either their unwillingness to engage with us or our own inability to be heard.

Yet, as artists interested in the materiality of radio waves—in bypassing corporate communications infrastructures and harnessing atmospheric conditions as tools of connection—we are drawn to persevere. CB radio is both an antithesis and an expansion to our ongoing collaborative practice with ‘open wave’ reception and grass-roots community engagement (Shortwave Collective, 2025). Through our shared practice we aim to openly demystify analogue technology, often tied to male-oriented black boxes and techy know-how. We have made a very broad and yet strategic start at exploring CB, its histories, communities, topologies and codes. Our dispersed, coordinated actions opened up multiple ‘cans of worms’ and led to many discussions and possibilities for future research and projects. 

We attempted to connect with each other, to reach out to whoever we managed to receive, at different times, geographical locations and meteorological conditions. We heard languages that we could not understand and we tried to connect by speaking to the language often used in CB radio communications without success, or receiving intimidating responses, or we didn’t hear anything at all. We like to think that a Shortwave Collective CB Radio Community might be feasible in the near future, where we meet, discuss and perform our collectively composed CB Radio Poems. ​

10-9 TRIPLEA2M 10-9
TRIPLEA2M is not a deadkey
TRIPLEA2M To the world c-mon
TRIPLEA2M is a good-buddy
TRIPLEA2M is not a Rambo
Triple A2M 10-44 Roger
10-4 
BREAKER, BREAKER, ONE-NINE

TRIPLEA2M 10-77
I hear you, 10-75

10-45, 10-45, ROGER?

TRIPLEA2M 10-35 NO Message Received, No Connection made
BREAKER, BREAKER, ONE-NINE

I am on a flip-flop, I’m modulating on the CB
10-9
I am on a flip-flop, i’m modulating on the CB
TRIPLEA2M 10-19
10-9
10-19
10-25 TRIPLEA2M
10-65 
NO MESSAGE RECEIVED

Roger, Roger
No meat wagon, no pregnant roller skate, no juicebox, no go-go girls (on the dance floor), No 25, No 50

10-9
No meat wagon, no pregnant roller skate, no juicebox, no go-go girls (on the dance floor), No 25, No 50

No smokey, no mama bear, no miss piggy or honey bear, no Gringehella, hitting the jack-pot

10-20 GHOST TOWN
10-20 Little Cuba
10-20 Salty

BREAKER, BREAKER 1-9

TripleA2M Size Matters

10-99
QRT
ROGER

Credit: 
This text and accompanying audio work work produced during OUT.RA and Skaņu Mežs’s ‘tekhnē online residency’ between September 2025-January 2026. 
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References:
Blake, A.M. (2011) ‘Audible citizenship and audiomobility: Race, technology, and CB radio’. American Quarterly, 63(3), pp.531-553.
Blake, A.M. (2019) Radio, race, and audible difference in post-1945 America: The citizens band. Springer Nature.
Book Craft Guild (1976) Official CB Dictionary. Book Craft Guild Inc. New York: USA.
Bongaro, E. W. (1978) The Influence of a Citizen’s Band Radio Activity on the Self-Concept and Communications Patterns of Nursing Home Residents (M.A. Thesis, University of Oregon)
Engelmann, S. (2021) ‘Planetary Radio’. The Contemporary Journal 3 (March 02, 2021). Available at: https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/strands/sonic-continuum/planetary-radio (Accessed: 22nd January 2026)
Hogan, W. & Titlow, D. (2017) Eyeball Cards: The Art of British CB Radio Culture. Four Corners Irregulars. 
Lane, K. (1955) ‘How to travel with a boyfriend’ American Magazine (October 1955) 20-21. 107-09.
Prévos, A. (1986) ‘CB’ers and Cibistes: The Development and Impact of CB Radio in France’. The Journal of Popular Culture, 19(4), 145–154. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1986.1904_145.x
Shortwave Collective (2025) ‘Collective listening across distance’. Feminist Review, 140(1), 20-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789251352753
Smith, J.J. (1981) ‘Gender marking on citizens band radio: Self-identity in a limited-channel speech community.’ Sex Roles 7, 599–606. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00291747
S9 Magazine (1977) ‘CB Newswire’. Cowan Publishing Corp. New York: USA. Available at: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-CB-Radio/S9-Magazine/S9-1977-08.pdf? (Accessed 22nd January 2026) 
Watts, T. and Barton, J. (2011) ‘“I Can't Drive 55": The Economics of the CB Radio Phenomenon’. The Independent Review, 15(3), pp.383-397.