Pursuant to the provisions of Section 95.401 of the Commission's Rules and Regulations, this office has received reports of unlicensed operation, use of unauthorized "handles" in lieu of station call signs, and transmissions exceeding the four-watt maximum on the Citizens Band Radio Service.
Licensed operators are reminded that channel identification, station call sign use (KAA-prefix), and adherence to channel allocation are mandatory under federal law. Failure to comply may result in forfeiture, license revocation, and/or fine not exceeding $500 per occurrence.
/s/ Field Operations Bureau, Region V
Dear Friends on the Highway,
They sent me one of these last winter. Hung it on the wall over the CB. Read it twice and went back to driving.
Here is what they will never put in the rulebook. When my rig threw a u-joint outside Cheyenne at three in the morning in February — twenty-two degrees, no shoulder lights, wife six hundred miles away — it wasn't the call sign that brought Catfish out of his bunk at Little America with a torque wrench and a thermos. It was a handle and a frequency and a man who heard me and answered. KAA-7392 never saved a single life. Catfish saved mine.
We're not a hobby. We're not nuisance traffic on their precious spectrum. We are the working people who haul the country's groceries and the country's steel and the country's medicine through every kind of weather, and the radio is how we look out for each other when nobody else will. The four watts they let us have is the most honest broadcasting in America. No sponsors. No bosses. Just a driver in a cab telling another driver where the ice is.
Keep your handles. Keep your channels. When a brother breaks down at mile 219 you key the mic and you answer. That's the only rule that matters out here.
— Cannonball Mary, KAA-2188 (and proud of both names),
Reno, Nevada · March 1974