Here’s another in a series of “Other Radio” posts regarding Amateur (otherwise known as “Ham”) Radio.
When someone mentions Ham Radio, most people normally think of CW (Morse Code). Radio operators sending messages to other Hams. Making contact with faraway places, with some operators getting awards for the most contacts to, say, Europe or Asia. Well, all of that is true. Amateurs are often the guys you see on YouTube – Tornado Chasers. Stations that help out in emergencies, such as Hurricanes and Earthquakes. Yes. Ham Radio operators are all of that.
However, Hams are humans and like most organizations, the Ham community has its thankfully SMALL share of people that I’d like to call “Bad Boys”. These glorified CBers tend to congregate on just a couple of frequencies, out of the tens of thousands of radio frequencies allocated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Thank God! The two most notorious frequencies on Ham Radio are 14.313 – a spot on 20 meters where decades ago, was the scene of some of the Amateur Service’s biggest enforcement action. I’ll leave it to the reader to Google that frequency to find out what happened several decades ago.
I’m going to make the operators of stations who were on 7.200 mHz last Friday famous. Posted here for all to see, is the gross (and highly illegal) behavior of certain ham ops on this one particular evening. This is NOT typical of Amateur Radio – and that’s exactly why I’m posting it here. So that anyone interested in this great, historic and storied radio service won’t stumble across this and think this is how we operate. We don’t.
Some of our listeners may find what they hear offensive. Others will roll with laughter. This recording is NOT for the ears of children! But I present this in the hope that anyone in the ARRL (American Relay League) “Volunteer Monitoring Program” will hear it and find a way to take action. I can think of nothing more worthy of attention to that group than shutting down a few of these operators whose only goal in life seems to be intentionally interfering with the normal operation of an Amateur frequency. For the rest of you, enjoy!
I remember back 25+ years ago when ham radio was an even bigger mess. 75m had some real big problems that were eventually cleaned up. One ham that used to impress me was a guy who broadcast music in the AM subband. Not sure what equipment he was using but the audio fidelity was better than I heard on the AM broadcast band LOL. Must have had a professional audio setup and a classic AM transmitter as most modern amateur radios with AM have rather poor quality AM compare to the old transmitters of the 50’s and 60’s.