Buy and sell UK CB radios. Learn CB and LoRa mesh networking. Find your local radio community. No gatekeeping. No jargon. Just radio.
eBay left a gap. Motor-Oid fills it. Honest private sales. Seller declares UK-spec, unmodified. No hidden fees, no dodgy kit. List in 5 minutes from your phone.
Photo upload → Gemini identifies make, model, band, condition → listing live with QR code. Compliance check built in. UK-spec only.
List your radio →Midland, President, Cobra, Albrecht, TTi, Uniden, K-PO, CRT — all the standard UK brands. Filter by CB radios. Buy local or nationwide.
Browse CB radios →The Old Spark at radi-oid.co.uk can identify almost any CB radio from a photo. Make, model, band, UK legality — all from the picture.
Identify your radio →Five minutes from phone to live ad. These are examples — click to see the real thing on Amazon.
To list, you need to be a member. Membership starts at £3/month — then five minutes from your phone, photos in, Gemini does the rest, listing live with a QR code.
List your radio →UK CB radio has been licence-exempt since December 2006. FM, AM and SSB modes became legal in June 2014 under updated Ofcom regulations aligned with CEPT standards. You don't need a licence to buy, use or sell CB radio in the UK.
Source: Ofcom Citizens' Band Radio — information and operation
Your radio can be cheap and nasty and you'll still get around the world on a good antenna. Spend more time thinking about what's outside than what's on the desk. The Old Spark's recommendations:
Fabulous antenna. High gain, serious DX performance. Needs a good ground plane — the body of your car is the aerial's earth. The bigger the magnet mount, the better the ground plane connection.
The tri-mag mount is the one to get if you're happy with three magnets on the roof. Zero SWR problems, solid contact, no drama.
Sirio Turbo 5000 on Amazon →Both well-proven mobile CB antennas. Good UK availability, straightforward installation, honest performance.
Watson CB antenna on Amazon →A mobile whip antenna is only half the system. The vehicle body is the other half. Bad ground plane = high SWR = burned finals. Big magnet = better contact = better radio.
5/8 wave, 6.7m total length, 8 radials. 1.5 dBd gain. Covers 26–28 MHz. This is the one if you're after distance — rag chewing, DX, serious operation. Mount it on the side of the house with good brackets.
Sirio 827 on Amazon →Quarter wave, simple, cheap, works. If you're just getting on the air for local rag chewing this is fine. No drama to install.
Don't underestimate them. A half-wave dipole hung on a wire costs almost nothing and outperforms many commercial antennas. Delta loop, inverted-V, end-fed — all viable. Put it as high as you can and aim for a clear horizon.
You can put a dipole on the side of a house, hang a delta loop from a tree, or run a wire at the top of a telescopic pole. Time spent on antenna placement beats money spent on radio.
CB radio. LoRa mesh. No amateur licence required. No snobbery. The Old Spark has been running mesh nodes for months — here's what actually works.
Lightweight, efficient, scales to thousands of nodes. Battery lasts weeks not days. Hybrid routing — messages find their path, don't flood the network.
Three device roles: Companion (pairs to your phone), Repeater (extends coverage), Room Server (BBS-style messaging hub).
868MHz ISM band — no licence required in UK. Range: 2–10km typical, 50km+ with elevation.
⚠️ The project had a public split in April 2026. The legitimate team is at meshcore.io — that's who we link to.
Open-source LoRa mesh. Easy setup, huge community, works out of the box. Good for small networks (under 20 nodes) and first-time mesh users.
Limitations: Shorter battery life (constant broadcasting), flood routing gets chatty, chokes around 100+ nodes.
Hardware: Same kit works for both protocols (just flash different firmware). Start with a Heltec LoRa 32 V3 (£15–25) on 868MHz. That's the workhorse. Full hardware guide, flashing instructions, and The Old Spark's shack notes are at radi-oid.co.uk.
The Old Spark's full radio guide →Radio shops, shack operators, mesh repeater builders — become a Founder on Motor-Oid. List your stock, link your community, earn from every sale you facilitate.
Your own Motor-Oid stall. List your stock, share your QR code, earn per listing you facilitate. Your stall page lives at motor-oid.co.uk/stall/[your-name].
Building infrastructure? Get listed. Let people find you when they're setting up their first node. Community earns when the network grows.
Turn up with a phone. Do the Walkround. Charge £25 per vehicle. Buy credits in bundles — the more you list, the better the rate.
Chris P Tee has been a CBer since 1976. He didn't even have a radio yet — he was just listening. Learning how people talked. How they handled each other. The movie Convoy did it. Blue Peter did it. Together they lit a fire that never went out.
His handle was — and still is — Doc Strange.
Fifty years on, he still thinks CB radio got something right that the rest of the internet got badly wrong.
On CB, you could say the wrong thing. Someone would come back and say: "Hey — that's out of order." You'd say sorry. They'd explain why. You'd mean it. No hard feelings. Life went on. The channel stayed warm.
That's not how it works now. Now you say the wrong thing and the whole room turns on you before you've had a chance to understand what you did. Nobody explains. Nobody forgives. Nobody moves on.
CB radio had a better system. Correct once. Explain why. Give them a chance to change. If they keep going — then yes, boot them. But not before. Never before.
That's what MeshCB stands for. A community where people can say stupid things, learn, and stay. Because that's how you actually change minds.
Three sites. Each does one thing well. Together they cover everything from buying a radio to building a mesh network to running a community shack.
Buy & sell vehicles and CB radios. Private sales, operator hamlets, no middleman.
motor-oid.co.uk →Identify any radio from a photo. Full CB and mesh networking guides. The Old Spark's shack.
radi-oid.co.uk →