Ham radio nattering

[filkerdave]

This weekend I was out at Fire Island National Seashore again doing a NPOTA activation, trying to get in a bunch more contacts. Someone notices that we're not that far from 1 million QSOs for the event and we've all been pushing to get in what we can

Comments

[ritaxis]

Wait, there are people who deliberately screw with other people connecting to each other?

Considering that at any moment, you hams might turn from recreational to safety-disaster operations, that's not just annoying, it's dangerous and anti-social.

[filkerdave]

Yep, there are. Every now and again they get caught and fined or lose their licenses, but it's not often enough for my taste

[hrrunka]

SOTA suffers a bit from similar problems, and one of the reasons I don't do a lot of SOTA chasing these days is that I don't enjoy being a part of a pile-up. DX activity suffers a lot more from those sorts of problems. There are folk for whom catching that "rare" DX seems to be a matter of life or death, and there are folk who seem to take delight in making the DX difficult. Occasionally the worst of the latter get tracked down through local helpers and DF activity...

[filkerdave]

I don't mind the pileup that much, even though I can't compete with the big dogs. All a matter of timing and luck. (And being on the receiving end of a pileup is something different entirely.)

I'd love if some of these people got tracked down, especially the 14.313 and 7.200 crowd.

[hrrunka]

Yeah, being on the sharp end of a pile-up is entirely different from an operating perspective, but when there's deliberate interference it's a bit more personal, as it's your opration they're trying to disrupt.

I guess the 7.200 lot are a North American problem, as that's top of the band over here. 14.313 (and 14.300, which also has more than its fair share of "owners" who have shown themselves prepared to disrupt ongoing IARU emergency communication in defence of their patch) is just somewhere to avoid...

[filkerdave]

7.2 is definitely a frequency to avoid. Lots of people playing music, swearing, talking over each other. It's loads of fun. Same on 14.313.

14.3 has a regular maritime service net in the afternoon, but it's otherwise a normally decent frequency.

40m can be tough, since there's a LOT of nets running there. There's a LOT of "this is MY frequency" stuff going on there. (Usually between 7.175 and 7.3, which covers the General portion of the US band plans). And, of course, 40m has a couple of broadcast stations from somewhere. China, maybe?

Anyone disrupting emergency communications should have their license stripped and possibly be flogged with a length of RG-58