Similar to when you’re spec’ing a truck, having more power in a CB radio can come in handy, or at least that’s the idea when you plunk down extra cash to get extra power.
To that end, we tested President Electronics' McKinley USA 40 channel AM and single sideband (SSB) radio to see if extra transmission strength would pay off.
The McKinley, named for U.S. President William McKinley, offers four watts on the AM side and 12 watts on SSB. At $189 on Amazon, it costs $50 more than the President Johnson II, which offers the same key features without SSB.
Automatic SWR on the President McKinley makes it easy to match an antenna to the CB. The 14 shown on the screen above is a 1.4 SWR on channel 19. Not bad! The blue display can be changed to orange or green.Tom Quimby
It turns out that SSB uses half of AM’s bandwidth to transmit so I’d say that’s definitely more efficient. Plus, with three times the power of AM, it sounds like a great option to have where comms may fall short in rural areas like ours in Northwest Florida.
