BoatBanter.com - Radio Check! Radio Check!

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

Oh, and do be sure to join the ARRL so they can keep their
pensions
intact.

I've never been an ARRL member. They've done everything they can
to keep ham radio at the technology level of 1935, throughout
their history. They've done everything they can to preserve most
of the band for the old farts they represented "in the old days"
and to keep out the kids/young people from their "private bands".

Their arrogance prancing around any hamfest in their fancy
business suits trying to look important and "better" than the
hams in blue jeans that make it all happen always ****es me off.
"Why are you all dressed up, here? Are you going to church,
soon?", I ask them.

I've never been too fond of "controllers", those SOBs that always
try to take control of any peer group, like a ham club or the
whole of ham radio, the ARRL, a magazine company.

Riley Hollingsworth, Head of FCC's Enforcement Bureau, attended
our Charleston Hamfest a few years ago to discuss the changes
being made to the hobby and its testing. HE represents ME at the
FCC and does a wonderful job of trying to save ham radio from the
dustbin, of growing too old to recover.

He gave a nice speech and answered questions, then talked to
individuals who had questions after the meeting broke up. All
the while he was in the vicinity of other hams, him being one
himself, the ARRL "official" who was with him stuck to him like
GLUE in the ARRL guy's fancy suit. When it was my turn to shake
his hand, my question to him was, pointing to the ARRL
Bureaucrat, "Is this your ARRL Handler, Riley? He's been
attached to you since the first time I saw you." I wanted to ask
him if he stood over him in the head, but figured that was a bit
over the top...(c; Riley found it amusing, but the ARRL guy got
all red in the face. ARRL thinks they ARE ham radio. They ARE
about 20% of the hams....trying to control the other 80% with
their stupid bandplans, rule change requests, Morse Code Forever
attitude....to keep the kids off the bands.

Most hams since 1960 WERE CB'ers...or, like me, still are, sort
of. I find CB great entertainment if you quit trying to be some
kind of ham snob SOB all the time. I'm sorry you have such an
acid personality you can't enjoy it. I've probably, over the
last 40 years or more, gotten 500 CBers their ham licenses
teaching classes at clubs I've belonged to. Of those, probably
490 are great hams. The hobby gets rid of those who act like
assholes pretty quickly. My record is a 7-year-old boy who got
Novice at 7, General at 8, Advanced at 10 and was Amateur Extra
Class around 35 wpm SOLID copy by the time he was 12 or 13. He's
a big wheel in broadcasting, today, and I like to think I had
some part in his success, a great feeling.

When I was a technical School department head, a mother came to
me because she found out I was a ham, and told me a sad tale of
her blind-from-birth son, Bill. Bill was severely depressed at
14 over his condition and, as children are so vicious at times,
left out of play most all his life. He'd expressed an interest
in ham radio to his mother, who had no idea how terrible our
sickness really is....an addictive drug for sure.

3 of us local hams got together and dragged Bill out of his
shell, kicking and screaming, to hamfests he couldn't see, but
sure loved hearing, and taking him home to play with OUR toys.
We'd found a Heathkit HW-101 and restored it. We added some
blind operator toys that made the meter readings into sliding
tones so Bill could learn to peak and dip to tune the
transmitter. With Bill's help, I took a sharp-pointed soldering
iron to the plastic dial and made braille numbers at the cardinal
points so he'd be able to find a frequency behind a steel pin
over the dial. He had no trouble putting the little Heathkit
transceiver CLOSER than I could tune it reading the dial! He
even used to be net control of the SC SSB Net on 3915...within
100 hz ON A HEATHKIT!

Needless to say, we ruined his whole life. He got his ham
license and was/is very active on the bands to this day. He also
ended up with his First Class Radiotelephone commercial ticket,
now the GROL, and was an engineer/DJ/radio personality on several
AM and FM radio stations over the years. Last time I heard of
him, he was program director of the biggest Country Music FM
station in Columbia, SC, making pretty big bucks....to support
his family of 4-5 kids! His wife can see. I met her once.

Bill was a CBer. So what?

A couple of years after he got on ham radio, he called me to come
over to fix a combo AM-FM-TV audio receiver the Commission for
the Blind had handed out to blind people, here. It was dead, bad
rectifier. I went to his house about 8PM only to find the place
TOTALLY DARK without a single light on anywhere. His parent's
car was gone, the place looked deserted. I called him on the 2
meter FM and he came to the door. I didn't want to say anything
about the darkness, so made the BIG MISTAKE of walking into his
pitch black living room, tripping over the ottoman and FALLING
RIGHT THROUGH HIS MOTHER'S GLASS TOP COFFEE TABLE with a terrible
crash! I was all bloody, of course, from the glass cuts. His
parents came home an hour later and his mother gave him holy hell
over not having the lights on when I arrived. To this day, I
remember Bill saying to her, "I'm Sorry! I forgot he couldn't
SEE IN THE DARK!" After that, blind jokes were OPEN SEASON!

He always starts a conversation with, "Look Here!"

How many people have YOU gotten on ham radio?

Larry W4CSC aka KN4IM aka WB4THE aka WN2IWH way back then.
--
You can tell there's extremely
intelligent life in the universe
because they have never called Earth.