Hear-hear!!!!!!!

Ron Miller


-----Original Message-----
From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Martin G. McCormick
Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2014 11:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: has anyone noticed <fill in blank here> on the ham bands
lately?

	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.