Hi Martin,
Do you remember W2OY, Mike Premis. He was an old AM-er from the 40's to
the 80's when legend has it that he died of a heart attack while working
on his tower. They had to go up there and cut him down. He used to
have this sign on diatribe that went something like: No kids, no LIDS,
no space Cadets, no WB2s, no niggers, no Jews (you get the picture?)
How about the guy who called himself the Nazi pig farmer. He was from
some little town in the mid west--I can't remember which one. He used to
have the call of NA0T. That call has long since been reissued. He used
to jam that evil bunch of liberal wimps on 3950 kHz called The Freedom
Net. The freedom Net was a group of rather aggressive conservative
Republicans who openly discussed their disdain for liberals, Democrats,
and various racial and ethnic groups, but who were apparently 'too
liberal'--for the Nazi Pig Farmer. He used to jam them with music and
vulgarities questioning their manhood and patriotism.
Those are just 2 of the more obnoxious folk from the good old days.
On 5/17/2014 11:44 PM, Martin G. McCormick wrote:
> 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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