How hard do you think it is to be the youngest ham??? Hams are a bunch of old, fat white guys yelling about their lawns over the radio to some other old, fat white guy.......
so i hear... ;-)
Lawns? No. We yell about our various old man medical maladies.
Thus, for sanity’s sake, take up digital modes or contesting until you know who it’s “safel to ragchew with. Haha. Like other pilots.
I keep a list of pilots in the local area and HF frequencies I hang out on, in my phone. Callsign, name, and any interesting notes about what they fly or which airport, etc. They’re all “safe” to talk to and won’t launch into strange rants about various things that don’t even make any logical sense.
I’m on a BoD of a local ham club so I have to be somewhat nice and NOT post the hilarious and stupid things I hear on-air regularly, for the minor fear that it’ll be some member of the club I wasn’t aware of, who’s the compete dolt that I’m making fun of. Hahaha.
Being that I build and maintain repeaters I do have a number of pet peeves though. Top of the list is someone asks for a radio check (that’s fine) and TWO stations answer and say the guy sounds good (unmm, it’s a repeater... did the second station think the signal would change because of their location) and then worse, someone 200 miles from the repeater clear up in Wyoming will say they sound weak... oh but wait, everyone sounds weak...
Sometimes I try to educate, sometimes I give up and turn the radio off and wonder if I should take up underwater basket weaving or similar where I don’t have to listen to people who supposedly passed a test, not understand how a freaking repeater works.
Once in a while only person number three will answer and say, “You’re kinda noisy into the repeater.”
I just key up and say, “No, he’s not.” and then let it hang. LOL.
The other pet peeve is the guy who’s been told he sounds like azz into the repeater that’s sitting 6000’ above average terrain, and won’t build a $4 quarter-wave antenna and is using 500mW from mom’s basement and he’s 30+ years old. Okay not the brightest bulb in the batch, but for efffs sake...
We can only put so much pre-amplification on the receiver and filtering and drive the bastard right down into the measured noise floor to pick up a flea fart of a signal at 200 miles, and you can’t be bothered to hook up to a quarter-wave and think the rubber duck and 500mW at 50 miles is a good idea for a copyable FM signal?
I’ve climbed towers in windstorms for that crap?
Yes sir, you sound lovely on that over-deviated $30 radio from China with a bad mic element and the mic gain set wrong. Just peachy. So glad I swept the audio path to make sure it was nice and flat response all the way across so we could listen to that garbage signal of yours. Ahem. I mean lovely signal.
And three people can all respond from their picowatt transmitters in their mom’s basements that you sound noisy on their rubber dummy loads on HTs. LOL.
SMH. I call the hams who are more than a couple of years into the hobby who still can’t do anything more than press the “mash to mumble” button on whatever they bought on eBay this week... “Appliance Operators”.
We have one ham in town who’s been licensed for over two decades who literally has nerve cables up a single one of his own radios. He takes his cars to a commercial radio dealer to have antennas installed even. One time I asked him if he’d like to borrow a wattmeter to check SWR on one of his antennas. He refused saying he wouldn’t know how, even after I offered to show him.
Oh well. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up, I guess. Nice enough guy, just not even an ounce of clue about how radios actually work. Sigh.
Nate, recently heard a guy say that sent his radio back to supplier to program it. DMR. Sigh. 