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We’ve come full circle
15 January 2014 | by Back in the day, we Hams used to get blamed for everything!
Now, it’s come full circle and all these new fangled electronic devices seem to be polluting our bands with all kinds of RF noise.
It used to be that we had to prove that we weren’t the “interferers”, and now we have to prove that they are! Who would have thought that one day, the tables would be turned?
I remember when I lived in East Brunswick, I lived a couple of houses away from the only guy in New Jersey that didn’t have cable TV. He used to gnaw on my ear all the time that I was interfering with his TV. I even had him over to the shack to show him that my station wasn’t interfering with a small portable TV that I had set up there. That the TV picture didn’t so much as flicker when I transmitted didn’t convince him in the least.
But the funniest time (and you really just had to shake your head and laugh) was once when he confronted me as I pulled into my driveway. He was standing at the fence and was literally yelling at me how he couldn’t even use his TV the past couple of days because I was “screwing it up so bad”.
“Really, Bob?” I asked, “The past few days have been really bad?”
“You’re darn (he didn’t use “darn”, but this is a family friendly blog) right. I haven’t been able to watch TV the past four nights because of you and that Ham Radio of yours”.
I smiled (which made him angrier, but I couldn’t help myself) and answered, “Then that’s a pretty good trick, Bob, because I’ve been out of the country for the past two weeks. I just got back from the airport.” I had been in Switzerland on a training session for my old job.
Of course, the facts made no difference. I was still to blame as far as he was concerned. I can chuckle about it now, but back then it was annoying and upsetting to always be harped on for something that wasn’t my fault. It got to be that I hated walking out my own back door, dreading the next needless confrontation. I think that experience is one of the factors that drove me to go QRP full time, as I never want to go through that again.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!
3 Responses to “We’ve come full circle”
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- Matt W1MST, Managing Editor
The problem today is that this cheap equipment doesn’t have any proper shielding, and the FCC doesn’t care. I have 3 CO plug-in alarms in my house. Two were a little more expensive and have given me no trouble, the third was a bit cheaper and sometimes goes off when I use 20. I contacted the manufacturer and was shrugged off. My error in buying it, theirs in not caring about making something they can say is more than the minimum. But that’s just the way things are today.
Way back in 1968 I lived in Larchmont,NY. I walked up to my arptment and found 2 uniform cops and the cop who lived downstairs banging on my door. They said all the tv’s were going crazy because of my interference. The so called tvi cops were here to take charge and shut me down! I showed them my return ticket [with my name on it] from JFK airport, just returning from Europe. They went it without asking and went threw my arptment looking for something or someone else.
They left saying they were going to give me the benefit THIS TIME!
I installed a rather large tv antenna on a pushup pole on my roof with a rotor when I lived in long island NY,my neighbor accused me of sucking all the signals out of the air because he had a cheap tv antenna strapped to his chimmney and was getting poor reception.