I’ve been looking at the pre set kits so you can’t funk the VSWR up. As with these vans it’s a bit tricky anyway getting a good ratio unless you have a tin top. Just been trolling through what’s available nowadays on eBay etc and these miniature sets have a straight forty channels on U.K. FM and a straight forty set on Euro AM. The range will of course be limited but only by the antenna versus ground plane set up but they’re still four watts output. A complete ready to rock set up with a miniature eighty channel rig is about sixty five quid including the mike and a pre tuned mag mount antenna. So connect to live and earth , hang your rig somewhere, pop your mag mount on the roof and you is good to go. For sixty five quid it might be the best bit of fun. You can bang loads of extras on, but for what we want in convoys it should be spot on. The only extra I might consider is a remote speaker that you can hear a bit better when at sixtyish and all four cylinders are giving it what for. I’d be a bit reluctant to buy a second hand one as they’re so easy to break by keying the mike without a sorted antenna or a dummy load on it.
Back in the day with the AM stuff I was the Wizard Of Oz on the CB and Whiskey Oscar Oscar when I was DXing all over the place. I regularly used a sideband set up with a thousand watts amplifier with about four car batteries in an old transit. For extra output I had a twenty seven foot Avanti sigma antenna mounted on a scaffold tube poking through the roof. I would surf the ionosphere sometimes called the skip for hours when the conditions were right and you could get anywhere in the world but you didn’t have a lot of control of where you were contacting. When you contacted someone you would send confirmation cards called Q Cards over to them and they’d send one back to you.
Ozziedog,,,,,,,,,,,,CQ,,CQ,,CQ,,CQDX,,CQDX,, This is Whiskey Oscar,,,
luckily I got a Tin Top 
) to help set up the aerial.
