CB RADIO: When some rigs looked like car phones

Summary of this article: Several CB radio manufacturers in the 1970s produced rigs that looked like the stylish bulky VHF and UHF mobile telephones of the era — long before cellular phones took hold. Take a look back at a baker’s dozen citizens band radios that looked more like you could make a phone call from your car or desk than call home base over 27 megahertz.

Citizens band radio has produced some pretty cool looking radios over the years. CB’s heyday in the 1970s had radio manufacturers’ designers going nuts trying to outdo each other in an attempt to carve into the increasing market share every time “Convoy” played on radio stations across the land.

This E.F. Johnson Messenger 130A is the granddaddy of all CB radios designed to look like old mobile phones in the 1970s era. Imagine driving down the highway chatting on CB with a telephone handset to the side of your head! This was for real! Who knew if you really had a car phone or not?

No design was ever replicated more by CB manufacturers than that of the rig that looked like a car phone of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, mobile phones had bulky control heads with rotary dials and switches that mounted underneath the dashboard with a big boxy transceiver in the vehicle’s trunk. Manufacturers decided everyone needed a car phone that actually was a CB radio. You won’t believe how many of these fake car-phone CB radios were sold. We’ve rounded up as many as we could so let’s take a trip down the turnpike and revisit these CB phones.