The frist run 148's that were also made in the R.O.C. (China) were good radios as well. You would be talking late 70s to mid 80s on those , then Philly then Malaysia. The last Philly chassie's I saw were in the Grant XL's and LT's , they finally stopped making those around 2002 I believe it was. (those were also good chassies/boards) This artical pretty much sums it up on the newer 148s of today.
SEPT 22, 2000
NEW INFORMATION ON THE COBRA 148 NW ST.
Cobra has really shot themselves in the foot with this new radio, why you ask? I'm getting to that but first let me say that Cobra has been the industry leader in producing good quality CB radio's down through the years, there was the great line of Mobil "AM" radios such as the 25LTD, 29LTD. Their Sideband radios such as the 146, 148 gtl and 2000 were superb, they were stable and a radio you could be proud of.
The first thing that happened to Cobra was that Uniden wanted to raise the price on there PC boards, Cobra did not like this so they got some other company to make there boards cheeper! The first thing that happened was that they started using 1/6 Th. watt resistors throughout the whole radio, don't know how many radios failed in the field because of this, I had several myself that had a failure of several resistors that had previously been 1/2 watt. Of course this is all history, they fixed that problem.
Now we have this new radio, the 148 NW ST, It looks real pretty at night. I had a customer send me a 148 NW ST for peaking and tuning for better receive and transmit. So before doing anything else, I hooked it up to my antenna to get some radio checks, well, AM was OK, nothing to write hone about but clear and clean. Then I went to Sideband, now people say they can't "clarify" me in, What! So I tried some others on the band with the same results, can't clarify me! So I'm thinking maybe my oscillators are off frequency so I check them and find that they are a little off so I align them. This time is the same as the last, they can't clarify me!
So I really got concerned! After checking the oscilator frequencies I find that they change when I modulate! What the Hell! they are not supposed to change, they are supposed to be rock solid! I placed a volt meter on several test points and found that the voltage to the oscillators is changing with modulation! So I start looking for the reason for this and ran into the cause right away.
The new units don't have the MB3756 Voltage Regulator, They have decided to further cheapen the radio by doing away with it! and installed a 3 pin voltage regulator in its place with a series resistor on the 8 volt pin, on the input pin there is no voltage drop, on the output pin there is.
What this all boils down to is this, the radio is in my opinion now is somwhat "unstable" on sideband and I for one, would not own one! To my knowledge it could be inproved with some additional filtering and RF bypassing.
