Reader Submission: The fraud of “the tune” – The rise of Fine Tune CB

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
A reader sends this intriguing write-up. This was sent via some random gmail account so I have no idea who wrote it. Enjoy 2019!

 

The Fraud of “the tune” – The rise of Fine Tune CB

I am a member of a radio group that decided to look into all of the noise surrounding Fine Tune CB and his minion Rabbi. I have conducted several interviews with customers of his and others that have talked with or know “Hard Drive” personally over the last month and a half. None of the interviewees wish to be named. All of them have supplied evidence to review like emails, screenshots from FB messenger, etc. The author also wishes to remain anonymous. If anyone is named they risk threats or bodily harm from these maniacs. They have done it before. Most of what is presented here you can find easily with Google as well.

Where do we begin? We start to really hear about Fine Tune CB around 3+ years ago in 2015. Prior to this time you heard him if you listened to sesame street and happened to hear him advertising his service sitting in the parking lot of truck stops in various parts of the country. He was nothing more than a truck stop peak and tune guy cutting limiters and turning controls in radios. You could get your echo boards, roger beeps, noise toys, and so forth. He had even been chased out of some truck stops since he was competing with their inside tech in their own parking lot. You know, the things he denounces today he was doing less than five years ago.

To distance himself from being a “truck stop technician” he had to try to take someone else down. Trucks CB Sales was his first target. He actively sought out radios that had been worked on at Trucks CB Sales to find even the slightest issue to make a video over. The black goop was popular. One of my interviewees mentions a campaign where he would do the work for free just to get his hands on radios to use against Trucks CB. This campaign against Trucks persisted for over two years. At one point Rakish was a proxy to get radios into the hands of Hard Drive to be used against Trucks CB.

Quoting the ARRL handbook, literature he found on the internet, even make up some of his own terms and his catchphrase “tap, tap, tap, pay attention” while showing you part of an instrument is what he would become famous for. Copying imagery from other websites and scribbling on them and claiming they are his work without attribution to the original author is another pastime. His videos mention “Plagiarism” but this is another attempt to make you look at someone else instead of him. The is virtually the only golden screwdriver out there at the moment that copies the work of others.

This is part of the fraud and deception. His videos are shot on a camera and the sides are edited out while claiming it’s done on a cellphone. You can even see the reflection of the video camera in the very same videos he says are being done on a cellphone. He makes references to playing three card monte and other street hustles with your repairs or “tunes”. The constant bombardment telling you to pay attention lowers your guard. You think Hard Drive wants to help you.

So you think, he keeps poking at it telling me to look at it, so he can’t possibly be misleading me. Why would he make me look at this if he was telling me a lie? No other techs tell me this. They must be hiding something! Hey, this guy must be genuine. And I can see the screen but I am not a tech or engineer so I don’t know what I see. I should just take his word for it. I will trust him. And you are hooked. You just drank the punch at the party spiked with ludes and got date raped by someone that resembles Bill Cosby.

Enter RabbiPorkChop. A fan of Rakish. Tells stories as far back as 2012 about the miracle of Hard Drive and the one hundredth of a microvolt tune. More on that later. Awe struck because he got to hang around a troll like Rakish and a golden screwdriver that performed miracles. He starts trolling other radio shops. He proclaims to have found the best radio tech in the world! Not even engineers under the employ of world governments or alphabet agencies can match Hard Drive!

Hard Drive during the years from 2016 to 2018 grew even more bold. In comes the idea that he has a “tuned bench” and that his motorhome and contents adhere to NIST standards. He is the only one in the world with a “tuned bench” – whatever that is supposed to mean. As Rabbi trolls other shops Hard Drive mirrors the videos on his channel. They get so intertwined that people think they are the same person. In 2017 Rabbi and Hard Drive start to buy subscribers for his YouTube channel. To go along with the subscribers they buy block of views. Often these are done in conjunction with generating sympathy from his followers. Inflammatory posts on social media with slogans to rally people to their side, claiming that there is a campaign to suppress a video with dislikes. All the time buying those dislikes themselves. One of my interviewees sent me a screenshop of RabboPorkChop’s personal photobucket that contains a screenshot where dislikes were purchased for a video with ID “RU3VRnPK9xo” and the title as of this writing is “FINE TUNED” Stryker SR955HPC SSB Dual Tone – Two Tone Test .. “PAY ATTENTION!”. We know that Rabbi purchased these dislikes for at least this video but I am told that dislikes were purchased for two other videos by Rabbi and that he has spent hundreds of dollars on likes, dislikes, subscribers, and views for Fine Tune CB. This same video has also been prominently featured as supposed evidence that Fine Tune is superior to any tech in any capacity in any place. That brings us to the campaign to discredit other shops, no matter who. Lester’s customs, Bob’s CB, anyone. It did not matter. Make videogates. Paint them in a very negative light. This persists thru 2017.

End of 2017. Enter CB Kidd. Supposed brainchild of Ken Baker of NRO and RNN. Hard Drive and Rabbi were frequent targets along with Windy City – at the time also hated by NRO and RNN. CB Kidd content was really produced primarily for RNN at the direction of Rakish himself. Supposedly Dennis had some artistic license here but Dennis declined an interview so this cannot be validated. RIP Ken Baker.

Their current target is Mikes Radio Repair. They will do anything to try to discredit him but it just keep going down in flames.Virtually no success in doing so and if anything has made him more popular than he was. These attacks, having largely failed, leads us into the latest scamvertisement campaigns.

“Tuned Benches”, “certificates of calibration”, “NIST traceable”, and “adherence to NIST standards” are meant to be sales slogans. There are no such things as “tuned benches” because a bench is just a bench. Proper workbenches are usually wood with metal frames that have some form of ESD protective measures taken like mats, and so forth. This is not something that you “tune” like a radio. The next thing being these “certificates of calibration” is that anyone can create one. ANYONE. Word or Excel are your friends. You can get fakes templates on Google. The place he got this “certificate” from is not even accredited. This means a lot if we are talking about calibration and NIST standards which is where we are going next. You cannot adhere to NIST standards driving around in a motorhome. Anyone can say they adhere to these standards but has he even bothered to read the plethora of standards documents? He isn’t quoting them so we can safely say he has not. He has absolutely no documentation, no test procedures to verify his equipment before use, nothing. Where are his logs? Where are his primary standards? How does he know where to set that Bird sampler he is seen twiddling with? He doesn’t even know how to use a known signal source to calibrate that sampler. It could be -50dBm, or -60dBm down. Does he know? What about the frequency response of the system? Has he plotted that? Of course not! He is “Fine Tune” and he should know it considering how much he spouts accuracy but we never see any of it. On top of all of this super duper supposedly calibrated equipment he uses a piece of junk MCM signal generator that came under several other names like Mitek, LodeStar, Or Tenma. Oh! it has a frequency counter. Something he doesn’t even have there and is REQUIRED for the factory alignments he claims to do before the “fine tune”.

These days it’s all about devices imported from China by EKL imports. These devices have amazing properties. Even revolutionary properties. These devices according to him are as revolutionary as warp drive. He is pretty much the only one that is pushing the Max Mod and ERF junk. If you want to send your money to a guy living in a 1.2 million dollar house with access to Puget sound, be my guest. Now, if you do not have a radio with “Max Mods” or “ERF” MOSFETs that are really custom branded generic parts, your radio may explode or catch fire according to Hard Drive. This goes along with shock imagery he will often post on Facebook of burned out trucks. The implication is that any radio that has any other MOSFET in it but one imported by EKL from China means you could be hurt, or even killed. Things have gotten this bad in Fine Tune land that they have resorted to scare tactics. Previous customers are being asked to spend more money to get “upgrades” done to their “fine tuned” radios to prevent death or injury to themselves or others. In most of these cases the radios came with these devices and have been working for many years, even upwards of a decade or more and there are no DOT investigations pending regarding truck fires in CB radios. That’s because it’s not happening.

Another latest as of year end 2018 is modified speakers, and showing videos of him talking to people when conditions are favorable. These are his “real world” tests but he never points out that he is talking to other people that do not have “fine tuned” radios, and we hear other people that do not have these magical “fine tuned” radios besides who he is talking to that he alleges have these radios.. It must be his “miracle” receivers that according to him, receive to -160dBm or -147dBm depending on the day of the week. If he had done the simplest of research he would find out that the Johnson-Nyquist noise floor for a receiver using channels consuming around ~10Khz of bandwidth, which is pretty much what an AM CB is, would be around -134dBm. It’s better for SSB because it’s in most every case single conversion and only a few Khz of bandwidth so we can get a little better performance. The reality is that these are best case numbers, and in reality its in the -120s for both modes on average. -160dBm is not possible, nor is -147dBm. They love to talk about the “tuned bench” and the “laws of physics” so there you are. No, he is not getting -160dBm, -147dBm /  0.001uV or 0.01uV as he alleges. “The laws of physics” Hard Drive…. them there laws of physics….

Then you have the “analog scopes” are better than digital scopes scam. He buys the cheapest hobbyist digital scope he could find, doesn’t terminate it properly because it’s a high impedance only instrument, complains to Siglent about it and demonstrates that he has NO IDEA how or why the voltage cannot be adjusted properly. Then complains that it’s not a “professional” unit. They ADVERTISE those for hobby use! Then he parades around a video done by respected YouTuber W2AEW claiming he (Alan) said that analog scopes were better than digital scopes. (he did not) when he was trying to show an image that needs persistence (like a CRT) and that an LCD screen can’t really do and it’s miraculously better than a digital scope because this analog scope was being used to display an XY video signal.

“Calibrated S9” is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. It’s like something from late night infomercials. “Calibrated S9!!!!!!” WOOHOO!. As pointed out on the WWDX forum a few times by a member there, what good is S9 if S8, S7, S6, S5 and so on are all wrong? so your S Meter is only good for one reading ever? It’s because S Meters are RELATIVE AND SUBJECTIVE. It’s not something that gets “calibrated”. Nothing else matters on the entire scale except that area that’s the width of the needle or that single bar on a bargraph meter What kind of idiocy is that? Some of the other scams are at least concealed but this one is just out on the open ridiculous.

“Scope tuned” Coax! Let’s not go into this one. That’s worth another several pages of using coax to hide system mismatches. It’s not magic he is just using the coax to mask a problem in the system. No, he does not have a new formula for the speed of light. If you believe that he somehow knows more about the speed of light than the worlds leading scientists you need to get a reality check. And if he does where are the papers, the tests, the peer review? Let’s not even get into him being the only one with a special formula that’s not online and he is the only one in the world with it.

Getting on 38LSB these days to advertise CB tunes. Yeah, we have recordings of it too… and not the ones you edit for YouTube.

Now, let’s just cut to the true and false of it all…..

“Tuned Benches” – false
“Adherence to NIST” – false
“Traceable to NIST” – Possible. He needs to show real documentation not just the corner of some handwritten page.
“SuperDuper -160dBm Receivers”  – false
“Max Mods and other imported EKL devices save your radio and truck from catching fire” – false
“Splatter box radios are bad” – true
“I am the best ever” – that’s obviously false
“Calibrated equipment” – no way to know if those cals are even legitimate, but very VERY unlikely these are legit cals.
“Analog scopes are better” – false
“Calibrated S9” – WHAT? Bullshit.
Only one with the formula to “tune coax” – Bullshit.