My 30-year-old CB radio finally gave up the ghost. I use it to monitor traffic when I travel to Florida. I decided to replace it and check to see what Amazon had on sale. I found a Retevis MB-2 AM/FM radio markdown from $58 to $38. I ordered one and set it aside for a couple months. When I finally got it out of the box looked at it I thought it looked good for the price except I was puzzled by the large aluminum heat sink on the back. Why put a large heat sink on a 4-watt radio? I've been a ham radio operator for many years and my curious you got the best of me so I took the bottom panel off the radio to see what I could see. I noticed two RF transistors fastened to the heat sink. All I also noticed a very conspicuous jumper wire in the upper part of the circuit board. I hooked the radio up to a power supply and test it output power which was about 4 Watts on both AM and FM into a 50 watt dummy load. I also noticed that there were indicator lights on the front panel for high and low power neither of which were operating. I could see no reason for the white jumper wire on the circuit board so I cut it. When I turn the power on the low power LED lit. At this point I researched the radio on YouTube and discovered the same radio is used by fishing boats in Asia and is a 20-watt radio. The video also instructed which button to hold for 5 seconds to toggle to high power. I went back and checked the power output after toggling the button and suddenly my output power had jumped from four Watts on am to 10 watts and on FM 20 watts. The radio is programmed to operate from 25 MHz to 30 MHz. It is programmed in 20 Banks of 40 frequencies so instead of 40 channels you actually have 800 channels. I won't go into detail here about how to get into the hidden channels, but it can easily be done from the front panel without opening up the radio. There are plenty very detailed instructions on opening up the transmit frequencies on a number of different YouTube videos. I am posting a few pictures of the jumper wire you cut to enable high power transmit.
