While not directly answering your question, here is a suggestion that may improve your understanding of CB and help inform your decision about what radio servic

While not directly answering your question, here is a suggestion that may improve your understanding of CB and help inform your decision about what radio service to use. There are a number of WebSDRs available that provide a public web interface to radio receivers located in various places. They are live streams of radio traffic that can be tuned to your frequency of choice. If you go here[1] and filter by the 10m band and the North America region, you can find several that cover the 26-27MHz frequencies used for CB channels[2]. While none of these are located in the Bay area, it should give you a sense of how active CB is and what typical usage looks like. You can also use web SDRs to listen to ham (look up 2m/70cm calling frequencies as well as local repeater frequencies) and FRS/GMRS frequencies[3] in your area. To be perfectly honest, I feel like GMRS may be best for your use case, but the beauty of WebSDRs is that you don't have to invest in any equipment to listen. This way you can learn more about these different types of radio services and decide which is best for your use case, without lots of expensive and time consuming buy-in. [1] http://websdr.org/ http://websdr.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_band_radio#Standard_channels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_band_radio#Standard_c... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mobile_Radio_Service#Frequency_Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mobile_Radio_Service#F...