Legitimate CB's are so cheap, I don't know why you'd take any legal risk in modifying ham equipment. As a licensed amateur you face more legal liability than a

Legitimate CB's are so cheap, I don't know why you'd take any legal risk in modifying ham equipment. As a licensed amateur you face more legal liability than a non-ham since you can't say that you didn't know any better. 100W of output means both hearing someone far away and also being able to make sure they hear you. CB is generally "line of sight" - you don't need 100W of power to reach someone 10 miles away. I have no trouble reaching a repeater 10 - 15 miles away with my 5W VHF handheld. You can get skip communications from much farther away but instead of trying to skip your CB signals hundreds of miles away and hope that someone there has a CB and is doing the same thing... you'd be better off using an amateur HF transceiver when you're likely to find another skilled amateur operator on an HF calling frequency. This is technically not legal, but when SHTF you're not going to find anyone coming after you for it. It's not just "technically not legal", it's 100% not legal, except in case of emergency, in which case I think you can use any radio to send a distress call, whether type certified for the frequency or not. But you want to know that your equipment works, right? So you've got to be using it today if you're going to know that it's working when SHTF?