Death is sometimes relative ![Smiley :)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Just like the command prompt (c:\> ) was declared "dead" in 1995, it will be around as long as there are keyboards in one form or another,
CB will be around for as long there are 18wheelers on the road.
Maybe in the USA but not here in Australia where CB is dead. The truckies UHF CB channel is dead no matter where you go. It has been like that for 20 years. In the cities it is dead. No anybody copy, not YL's, no 10-4 good buddies, no eyeballs, no 10-20's, no 10-9's, no breakers, no go-the-breaker, no nothing.
What a most people don't know is it is permissible to encrypt speech on UHF CB; but illegal to do so on ham radio. Let's just say I know someone who ran a private mobile telephone service on UHF CB in country Victoria in the 1990's
. Philips FM320's with some added, er, shall we say "enhancements". Coincidentally, there was no mobile phone bill shock.
I think there is a bit of usage of UHF CB in Norwest WA by
some truckies & also by the "Grey Nomads" back & forth between their campervans.
Listening to the Perth CB Repeaters,& simplex channels on my handheld scanner,mostly all I hear is a few foul mouthed Yahoos---there would only be a handful of any kind of users.
Interestingly,there seems to be a bit of a Renaissance on 27MHz after dead silence for,as you say,20 years.
Early last year,I spent quite a bit of time playing around on 10metres using an Icom IC575a.
This radio receives down to 26MHz,& whilst poking about,I heard quite a few CBers on Ch 35 LSB & a few other frequencies.
Interestingly,they were mainly in Victoria.
If I could hear them,I had a good chance of hitting VK3RHF 10m FM repeater,which I did quite regularly last Autumn.
There were a few WA CBers on too,which interested me enough to try to unearth the old Electrophone SSB rig,but it looks like I may have chucked it out.