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Night and day. Apples and oranges. Each has its place and both are very different.

CB, or the Citizen’s Band is the Personal Radio Service between 26.9 and 27.5 MHz. CB was the first popular American radio service. Its hay-day was in the 60’s and 70’s and its popularity declined the 80’s as a result of wide-spread abuse.  The FCC gave up enforcement and declared license-by-rule. Nowadays the service is primarily occupied by the illegal power abusers and hobbyists that destroyed the service. There is the occasional local user who still tries to make use of CB regardless of the skip interference from many hundreds of miles away. Now interference to American CB by hobby stations in the Caribbean and South America is a major problem.

CB is still useful for close-in caravans, traveling by highway, and even for some local communication when the band is quiet. When I traveled across country in September 2001 I had more contacts using my first CB radio than I did using my VHF and UHF Ham radio equipment. There are more truck drivers than Hams. Drivers were an immediate source of traffic information, local news, and restaurant reviews. They made travel a whole lot more fun.

GMRS is a very-local line of sight radio service not beset with the problems in a short-wave radio service like CB. GMRS has been around for almost as many years as CB. It wasn’t until the popularity of GMRS began to increase in the mid-90’s that people started to see its true value.

The major advantages of GMRS over CB are:

1. Shorter antennas.

2. Up to fifty-watts of power.

3. Use of radio repeaters to extend range beyond direct simplex communication.

4. GMRS requires an FCC license and this truly is an advantage.  When people have to pay for a license I believe that they tend to value the radio service more. Certainly more than the plethora of unlicensed bubble-packers out there now.

5. GMRS line-of-sight operation is generally not subject to skip like the CB band. UHF radio does experience tropospheric ducting occasionally allowing communication over a hundfred miles or more but you will not hear or be interfered with by stations from many thousands of miles away.

6. Family communication is generally encouraged in GMRS and hobby chats like those of the Amateur radio Service are generally discouraged.

7. Because the FCC has worked with the GMRS community over the last ten years with GMRS to end commercial piracy GMRS is quiet enough to permit families to develop and maintain real communication systems.

8. Like CB, GMRS licensees use the service for personal business and personal communication.  The five minute restriction required for CB operation is not a requirement in GMRS.

9. GMRS does not cause RFI in televisions, stereos, and telephones like CB does.

10. GMRS allows voice scrambling for a small degree of greater privacy. The use of tone-coded squelch is possible in GMRS and not in CB. This makes it possible to hear only calls from your family’s radio sets versus everyone else’s.

CB was more attractive for years because the cost of equipment was much less than the commercial grade equipment required for GMRS. That also was a negative because anyone could buy a radio. Behavior on that band is often very child like and sometimes pornographic. The low-cost benefit wore off fast.

The major drawback to CB was also the size of the required  antenna. A quarter-wavelength antenna for CB is one-hundred-two inches long while a quarter-wavelength antenna for GMRS is about six inches long.

GMRS still requires a license and the cost of real GMRS radios as opposed to the chew-toy bubble-pack radios is still more expensive than CB. To get on the real GMRS new users need to contact a real commercial radio shop or find GMRS licensees near them that can help find equipment and local repeaters that can be used. It is not as easy as it should be. PopularWireless.com and before PopWireless the Personal Radio Steering Group website have been the lead sources of GMRS information on the Internet.

GMRS sounds clearer and more natural because of the FM modulation used. Your reliable local distance of communication can be greater with GMRS when you choose the right antennas, power levels, and radio equipment. CB communication will suffer where GMRS will get through.

CB always tended to attract abuses. Over the years it was popular for CB users to have their radios modified to operate on unauthorized channels and at illegal power levels. A fishing charter would have their radios modified to avoid being heard by another charter service. The end result was interference to military, Civil Air Patrol, and radio-control communication also in the vicinity of the CB band. GMRS tends not to be plagued with illegal behaviors except in urban areas where some unscrupulous radio shops still put unlicensed systems on GMRS channels.

GMRS has  had recent FCC enforcement. The FCC did its best to rid itself of the enforcement responsibility for CB back in the late 90’s. The FCC allows local law enforcement to handle typical problems associated with excessive power use in the CB radio service. Local jurisdictions never did get excited about doing it and few actually do. The FCC has helped GMRS licensees shut down unlicensed commercial users that made it difficult for families to use GMRS.

GMRS is in many ways a better option but it remains the more expensive licensed option.