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Date: | Sat, 17 May 2014 22:44:34 -0500 |
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I was a short wave listener back in to the early to mid
sixties and became an amateur radio operator in 1969 but didn't
get on the air until 1970 so my memory of what used to go on
back in the day is reasonably long-lived.
It was not any better back then except you had to do
more work to play music and noises than you do these days with
computers and nice ways to organize one's sound effects
libraries. My goodness, think how hard it would have been back
in the sixties to make a repeating loop of some vulgar remark or
a multi track song about some other ham's behavior. The list goes
on. The variety of garbage is wider now than then and the music
has much better fidelity than it did then.
In the sixties, the sidebanders fought with the AM'ers
on a nightly basis and K4EGB in Paduka, Kentucky could be heard
on 80 with a whopping signal giving his take on the world and
how it aught to be. There were countless other voices on AM and
SSB screaming the same sort of racist and homofobic taunts at
each other and sending CW and slow-scan racket to jam the
frequency not to mention swishing their VFO's back and forth and
cursing everybody else for behaving like CB'ers. It puts me in
mind of lots of pots and kettles with high photonic absorption coefficients
or low alvidos somewhere near their IQ's. Some of the biggest
miscreants were people who should have been setting examples but
instead just fanned the flames. No, it wasn't better in the old
days. It wasn't even that different.
All we can do is not participate in the trash that goes
on on 14.313 or various frequencies on 75 meters late at night.
One thing that has changed is that the FCC enforcement
staff is down from what it used to be and we need more people
like Riley Hollingsworth who turned the racket down during his
term by taking out some of the worst offenders. This stuff
tends to snowball and there are those who think self-policing
means behaving like some sort of policeman which just adds to the
noise. I think even the level of enforcement ebbed and flowed in
the sixties depending on what activities were thought to be
important at the time.
I admit that I sometimes listen to that junk and marvel
at the extent some of these yo-yo go to to QRM people they don't
like. What a misuse of resources and an incentive for world
regulators to just pull the plug on the amateur service
all together. I doubt they will do that, but I hope we again get
enforcement in the US and Canada that cares enough to go after
the really bad eggs. As soon as it becomes known that trashing
the air has real consequences, a lot of this junk will simply
disappear.
73
WB5AGZ
Eric Oyen writes:
> Has anyone noticed the level of intentional QRM on the ham bands lately? =
> I just heard some interesting stuff on 14.278. It appears that the 11 =
> meter crowd is starting to play the old games on 20 now. Recordings, =
> noise makers, fowl (and not as a bird) language, etc. I long for a =
> return to the older days of HF when lids like this were tracked down and =
> dealt with promptly.
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