A Little Something to Do, Part 2

(Here's a link for Part 1.)

In early September, I went hunting on the American Radio Relay League's website for amateur radio classes. The ARRL is the largest US amateur radio umbrella organization. They advocate for amateur radio to the FCC (and Congress), they encourage amateur radio contests and classwork, and they have their own series of publications for and about amateur radio. (Like my study book from Part 1.) The ARRL does have their detractors, and holy crap are those people vocal about it, but the ARRL is also the best voice that amateur radio has in the US.

Maybe it's because my mind works the same way as the webmasters who designed the ARRL's website, I quickly found a free (!) class available beginning in September and lasting through October. I quickly emailed the contact person, who confirmed that yes, they still have openings and I could just show up at the bright early time of 9 AM on Saturday morning at the Red Cross building here in Cincinnati. 

If you ever wondered whether ham radio
and MMO hobbies are similar... Yes, they are.
From imgflip and SP3POW.

The night before that first class I tossed and turned in bed, finally getting to sleep after 1 AM.  It had been at least 24 years since I last had an in-person class*, and I wasn't sure what to expect. Would I be the oldest person there? Would there be a crowd? What sort of people would the students be? The instructors? Would I have issues even getting inside the building?

The answer to that last question, thankfully, was no. There were two people monitoring the front door and I didn't get harangued any more than necessary, once I explained I was there for the ham radio class. I followed their directions to the correct room, and I discovered that much to my surprise I was one of the youngest people in the class.

From memeguy.

There were seven people in the class (myself included), and three instructors. I soon learned that the instructors viewed the class as something closer to providing guidance while we learned the material for the entry level license, the Technician Class. They admitted that we really didn't need them to learn the material, as the ARRL books were fine for learning the material, but they were there to provide some hands-on learning about amateur radio as well as answer questions. I could see that despite the class being free that some people would drop the class after realizing that they could just study by themselves and take the test --and to be fair, one did**-- but once I got over the initial disconnect between my expectations and the reality I warmed up to the class.

Part of it was seeing the equipment up close and personal, which to a gearhead like me I found fascinating, but I think another part of it was that the instructors were uniformly upbeat about our chances of passing the exam. As long as you study, take practice tests online, and keep up with it, they said numerous times, you'll pass.

***

While the ARRL had its own practice test website, and I did take those practice tests while I studied, I spent a lot more time on hamstudy.org:

This place became my friend.
This is as of November 8, 2025.

I could take tests and study by being quizzed on all of the exam questions to my heart's content. That's one nice thing about the Amateur Radio license exams in the US: all of the questions are taken from pools of 400 (Technician), 450 (General), and 622 (Amateur Extra) questions for each license class, respectively. Since those are already known, you could theoretically study for the test by simply memorizing the questions. Of course, that doesn't really teach you anything other than how to pass the exam, but it could be done.

When I started taking the practice tests for the Technician exam, I realized I had my work cut out for me. I had to get 74% of the questions correct on the exam, so that meant 26 out of 35 for the Tech license, and I wasn't even hitting that. For somebody who'd prided himself on being at least somewhat savvy with radio and electrical circuitry over the years, that was tough to accept. If I were serious about this, I realized I was going to have to buckle down and really study.

That's mint tea, no caffeine. I wanted to
sleep when I was done studying for the night,
you know.

I not only studied at night, when I'd typically get on WoW Classic and play for a bit, but also whenever I had a break at work. And for the astute among you, you likely notice that there were not only Technician Class license books as part of my study regimen above, but also General Class books. Because I can't simply do one thing at a time, I suppose.

When I started down this amateur radio classwork, I'd set a lofty goal for myself: to not only get the Tech license, but the General too. While the Tech licenses primarily focus on VHF and UHF frequencies, when most people think of "ham radio" (myself inclued) they think of people operating on the shortwave bands. Those bands, known as High Frequency (HF) in radio nomenclature, are between 3 Mhz and 30 MHz. The Tech license gets you access to the entire 10 Meter band (28.0 MHz to 29.7 MHz in the US), but if you want to talk to people using speech on the rest of the HF amateur radio bands you need a General Class license. Given my longtime interest in shortwave radio, it made sense that I'd want to do that. And, of course, my own arrogance led me to believe that I could do that easily.

Uh, nope. 

That practice result above was pretty much normal for me. This was but one of the times when I discovered I not only didn't remember a lot of things --the mathematics, in particular-- there were a lot of items I never had to deal with as a shortwave listener that I would encounter as a ham radio operator, such as concepts behind transmitters.

About the only good thing I did when I started taking the class was to NOT tell anyone that I wanted to pass both the Tech and General classes; I was putting enough pressure on myself as it was without being an asshole and waving a flag around yelling "LOOK AT ME!!! I'M AWESOME!!!!" I've had enough humble pie served to me over the years that I wasn't going to do that at all. 

By mid-October, I was passing practice tests for the Technician Class exams with regularity, so I shifted my focus to the General Class test. I had about 2-3 weeks before the license exam of November 1st, so it was very much crunch time. 

The stress I was putting myself under was
kind of like this. From Real Genius and makeagif.

At that point, I stopped trying to understand all of the material and focused instead on simply passing the test.

The last week before the exam, I admitted to the instructors that I was aiming to pass both Technician and General class licenses. The instructors were very encouraging, saying that I knew the material, so I just had to relax and take the exams. They also mentioned another little thing: when I take the Tech exam and pass (the exam costs $15 per attempt), I get a free attempt at the next higher license exam. So theoretically, I would only have to pay $15 to take both exams if I passed both on the first try.

Then one of the instructors dropped the bomb.

"You should take the Extra Class exam too."

"I haven't even looked at those questions yet," I admitted, while my mind was screaming "FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!" at me.

"Yes, but it's free, and it gives you an understanding of what it'd take to pass that exam."

I couldn't really say "no" to a free attempt, but I didn't want that to distract me from my immediate goals. Still, that "could I do it?" lingered in the back of my head all week.

***

Exam day dawned bright and sunny. The exam itself was at 9 AM, but I was already up at 5:30 AM. Yeah, I'm one of those people who don't sleep well the night before an exam, no matter what it is.

From Facebook.

I was supposed to arrive by 8:45, because the exam coordinators wanted to get started right at 9, but when I did I discovered that the instructors were already there, rooting us on. One of the class members had taken her exam earlier so she didn't need to show up, but she came to cheer us on as well. Those small things meant a lot, because I was really nervous. I should be fine, I told myself, as long as I don't get the exactly wrong question for each part of the exam. In each section, there's one question that gave me trouble, but what were the odds that I'd get them all in one randomly selected exam?

You can guess what happened.

When I started, I looked over the exam and immediately thought, "Holy shit." It was a nightmare come to life.

It had that smile on its face, too.
From theprchiro via Cheezburger.

I took a few deep breaths and calmed myself down. "It's only $15," I thought to myself. "I can take it again if I flunk."

Then I started slowly, working on the questions I knew. I answered all of those questions, then started working on all of the ones that I hadn't seen very much or I had trouble with. After that, I was down to a couple of questions that I just guessed at, and then spent another 5-10 minutes just making sure I didn't do anything stupid like selecting the answers in the wrong row***. I then had to wait another 5 minutes for my turn getting my test graded.

I passed.

That was a huge weight off of my shoulders. I took a deep breath and inquired about taking the General test. In short order I was back at my seat with a new set of questions to work on, and this time I relaxed a bit. The hard part was over, and now it was time to just go for it.

For some reason I found these questions easier, even though I knew I was going to get more wrong than the Technician exam. I'm not sure why, but my suspicion is that the pressure I was putting myself under was gone, so I found it easier to not dither and simply select answers. I finished, turned in my exam, and soon learned I passed the General exam as well.

"Do you want to try for the Extra?" one of the volunteer exam coordinators asked.

"Sure, let's do this!" I replied with an enthusiasm I didn't feel.

I sat down with the highest level exam, looked at the first question, and I knew the answer. "Hey," I thought. "I can do this."

Then I got to the second question.

"Uh.... Nope."

Yeah, this. From 9GAG.

Oh, that last exam was brutal. Positively brutal. I knew almost by the 3rd or 4th question that I wasn't going to pass this exam. Hell, I wasn't even going to get 50%. Of the 50 questions on the Extra exam, I answered about 15-20 for certain, and took a stab at 3-6 more, then I just selected "A" for all the rest. There was no penalty for just guessing, so why not?

"So," another of the exam coordinators asked as I turned in my sheet, "how'd you think you did?"

"You know how you're in college and you're in a seminar, listening to professors talk about their research and you have absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about? It was like that."

They all laughed.

Yes, this Mr. Bean skit was going through
my head while I was taking the Extra exam.
From Pinterest (and Mr. Bean, obviously).

It turns out that while I did fail, I got 20 questions correct. They told me I did a great job for going in blind on that Extra exam, and now I had something to shoot for.

Once I filled out some forms, I went out into the waiting area where everybody else was hanging around to see how I did. "Passed the General, and bombed the Extra," I replied.

I got congratulations from the rest of the students and the instructors, and once I'd signed a few extra documents we all left the building.

I'd like to say that my journey was just beginning, but the reality is that it's kind of on hold right now due to the government shutdown. The FCC won't process the paperwork until the government reopens --meaning I can't transmit on my own equipment until my license appears in the FCC database-- so I've got time to relax a bit and try to figure out what starter radio to purchase before I dive in. Still, four of us in the class have gotten to know each other fairly well, and we even met last Saturday for lunch. The club that sponsored the class and the exam was very welcoming, and I think I'm going to join that club and see how things go. 

So now you know what I've been up to for the past couple of months.

*System Admin class for HP-UX. While I knew UNIX since I coded on Silicon Graphics workstations back in the 90s, the sysadmin side of things was new to me, so I was sent off to a couple weeks' worth of classwork.

**Two dropped, but one of them had to drop because work kept them from attending regularly. The other simply stopped coming.

***Yes, I've done that before.

A Little Something to Do, Part 1

Last year, I began pondering what I was going to do when I retired.

The semi-official retirement age for my generation is 67*, when you can get your full benefits from Social Security, so I've got approximately 11 years left. It's a decently far enough way away, but not far away enough for me to be wondering what I'm going to do when I hang it up.

Obviously, the first thing I'd do is... not much, really. I already work from home --so I don't have a commute to deal with-- but I am on call 24x7, so... Okay, my work is pretty much integrated into my life. Even when I have a day off, I still check work email and occasionally take care of things because Murphy's Law is a real bitch. If I'm not doing that... Well, it'll take some getting used to, but I'm sure I'll survive. 

When my dad took early retirement at age 55, he wasn't sure what he was going to do either. And he annoyed my mom to no end when he was simply there all the time, inserting himself into how she had been running things for decades. So he eventually decided to volunteer as a "second job". He became a chaplain for one of the local hospitals, which he did until he died. I have absolutely no interest in anything vaguely resembling religion**, so that specific path isn't one for me, but that did give me an idea.

Well, that and Hurricane Helene last year.

Originally by Jabin Botsford via Getty Images
and The Washington Post. Found on grist.org.

When the remnants of Hurricane Helene smashed through the Appalachian Mountains in the Carolinas last year, almost all forms of communications were lost. Cell towers destroyed, power lines torn apart, you name it. The one form of communication that filled in the gap until power and telecommunications were restored was that of amateur radio operators. 

"Huh," I mused. It had been a long time since I thought of ham radio seriously***, at least longer than I'd been playing WoW, so that should give you an idea as to the time frame I'm talking about. I've known the occasional ham, and I encountered them when I worked at Radio Shack or (obviously) when I went up to the Dayton Hamvention, but my last trip to that convention was in 2006. But now, watching the news reports about Helene and how ham radio provided a vital link to areas that had no communications or power for a couple of weeks or more, I realized that was something I could do.

I have a history of tinkering with electronics and radio. In addition to my posts on the subject (this one included), when I was a kid I had my share of electronics kits from Radio Shack. 

The later ones had a numeric LED, but
this was the model I had. From Hackaday.

This was my first kit. (No, not the real thing,
but a picture of the model.) Yes, it did work, but I had
to hook up the wire to a water pipe to hear
anything. From Radiomuseum.org.

If I was interested in radio and electronics, and I knew some hams, why didn't I become a radio amateur back in the day? Well... There were a few reasons. In no particular order:

• There was a Morse code requirement. It used to be that you had to learn Morse code to get an amateur radio license, and the more advanced you went the greater the proficiency you had to demonstrate (in terms of words per minute). In 1991, the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC) dropped the Morse code requirement for the Technician license, which was a common entry level license. In 2007, the FCC did away the Morse code requirement for all amateur radio licenses in the US. That doesn't mean that Morse code isn't used, it's actually more popular than ever, but the people who use it are those who want to learn it, rather than they have to learn it.
  
  Still, that there was a requirement meant that I'd have to learn it, and I knew it'd be a bit of a pain. The older I got, the more that Morse code requirement looked like a problem.
  
  
• The hams themselves. Like any activity, you have those who are welcoming and those who are gatekeepers. Those who are nice and those who are assholes. Both the good and bad thing about going to a major amateur radio convention like the Dayton Hamvention is that you get to see a lot of hams in action in as much the same way as you can go to a comic con or gaming con and see the best and the worst of your community. What I saw of some of the amateur radio community was really off putting. 
  
  I now know that's not that great of a surprise --I'm a gamer after all, and we do tend to have certain elements of our community that people like to pretend don't exist-- but it still surprised me that a hobby that at its heart was about communicating with others you'd find people who had real issues with basic human interaction. And no, I'm not talking about people on the spectrum, but people who thought it a badge of honor to not use basic hygiene or be racist/sexist toward others. It's not a high bar to cross, but some of the ham community seemed to have issues with not being a dick toward certain people.
  
  
• The money factor. Let's be honest here for a moment: while radio might not seem like a hobby that you can easily spend a ton of money on, unlike the amount of cash an audiophile spends on stereo equipment, the amount of money just getting a halfway decent starting amateur radio setup for the HF bands can easily reach over $1000. Gaming PCs? Cars? Woodworking? Yeah, they're all potentially expensive hobbies too, just like amateur radio, but when you're starting out that initial cost can be a barrier to entry when you don't have a lot of money. Well, there is the used market, but like anything else, you'd better be careful and do your due diligence. To me, the VHF and UHF bands weren't "real" ham radio, so I never really thought about them much.****
  
  
  

  

  The ICOM IC-7300, currently $1099
  at Ham Radio Outlet (as of November 6, 2025).
  It's actually $300 off the regular price with coupon.
  Picture from ICOM America.

So yeah, amateur radio as a hobby wasn't really on my radar. Until suddenly here it was.

***

Once I reconsidered amateur radio as a hobby, the next step was to start doing some research. And for me, that meant diving into various parts of the internet. I didn't want to go to books or official websites, but rather I wanted to hear/read from actual hams what they thought of the state of the hobby. I realized that just like any other hobby, it was important to understand the context behind people's opinions, so I made sure to take my time and not rush things. Over time, people will reveal their biases, even if they weren't intending to share them. That meant reviewing several months' worth of data; while it sounds laborious, in reality I found it quite fascinating. 

Okay, I laughed. From Reddit.

Some people had axes to grind (that's the internet in a nutshell), and "others" were basically AI created slop (again, welcome to 2025's internet), but I did find quite a few hams whose input was really valuable. I won't go into specifics, but let's just say that in general I discovered that amateur radio is thriving right now. A few hams were grousing about the lack of Morse code requirements, which to their mind kept the riff-raff out ("the CB radio people" is what they meant), but others countered that by pointing out that shenanigans have been going on some of the amateur radio bands long before the Morse code requirement was dropped.

But there were hams who loved their hobby, were articulate and wanted to help people, and were very encouraging in their enthusiasm for ham radio. It was at that point that I made a decision to go ahead and buy this:

Yep, the same book I posted about a while back.

Basically, you could study the license manual for the entry level Amateur Radio class (the Technician Class), take the test, and become a ham once your license shows up in the FCC database. 

Sounds simple, right?

I cracked open that book, started reading, and...

That's what it felt like.
Thanks, XKCD!

Yeah, I'd been away from electronics and electrical theory for far too long.

There had just been so much that I'd forgotten that it daunted me. I pressed on and kept reading, but I realized that my brain was pulling random stuff out of my memory without any real understanding of where it came from. And then I just as quickly discovered that I was misremembering things, which is not good when you have to pass an exam in order to gain your license. 

So what did I do? I put the book aside for a while. Both work and car repairs wreaked havoc on my finances for a few months, so absolutely nothing was going to happen over the Summer. But late August I began to get a bit antsy; maybe I was approaching this all wrong. I needed to exercise my brain, but I also needed some structure.

I needed a class.

*It used to be 65 years old, but it was changed about 10-15 years ago beginning with Gen X. Yay us. But seriously, the "official" age is just a number, because the age you begin taking out Social Security can be several years before to a few years after that "official" age. If someone begins taking SS early, they get less of a stipend per month, but you get access to it early. If you wait until after your official age, you can get a larger monthly stipend. Hey, a few extra thousand dollars per month is a good chunk of change for waiting until 69 instead of 63.

**Yes, yes, I know; I've said it before. I'm not religious at all, while the rest of my family is very religious. I'm not planning on changing, especially since I started down my path when I rebelled against said religiosity. The Satanic Panic and the televangelist scandals of the 1980s provided the initial push, and it's been gathering steam ever since. To paraphrase someone, I might not mind Jesus or others; it's their fan club I have issues with.

***There's a couple of stories as to why amateur radio operators are called "hams". The most common one is that "ham" was a derivative of the derisive term "ham-fisted" by professional telegraph and then radio broadcasters. Rather than shying away from the term, amateur radio operators instead embraced the name in the 1920s and it stuck ever since. So no, it has nothing to do with cooking a ham or anything like that. I use "ham" and "amateur" interchangeably, and most hams do as well.

****And that was me being blind to what amateur radio was about. VHF and UHF ham bands are often more active than the bands in the shortwave spectrum, and the cost of entry there is much cheaper as well. Again, that's me being a bit of an idiot and missing that aspect of the community.

Who Knew?

Uh, wow.

Apparently the bots wanted to read about radio.

I'm not sure what happened, but those four posts this week got more views --bots or not-- than I've gotten on this blog in quite a while. Admittedly, we're talking about up to 10 times more than usual views, but still it was enough of a jump that Google Analytics (who apparently knows just how many bots and webcrawlers are out there so they're removed from their numbers) sent me an alert.

I keep looking at the posts, wondering where the trigger might have been, because it was four posts on a geeky subject that has limited appeal. I do find it ironic that the one with the overall largest appeal, on CB radio, got the fewest views, but after four days I guess that's to be expected.

While I should make some more posts on radio related topics, I'm going to hold off for a while for now. For starters, I don't have any real topics to follow up on at the moment. Yes, I'm still working toward an amateur license, but I'm not there yet. I have outdoor projects I'm working on, although with Autumn looming that's going to come to a close. 

I am glad I finally got around to exploring one of my other long-running hobbies. I've tried writing posts about it before, but I ended up shelving them or deleting them as they just didn't feel right. This time around, however, something clicked and I was able to pull stuff together and get it out in a reasonable amount of time. (I still would have liked to have found that CB radio, however. I certainly hunted long enough.)

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 4: Breaker Breaker One Nine, anybody got their ears on?

A side effect of that 70's kick I've been on this past year is that I came across this, from the second highest grossing movie of 1977 (pretty sure you can figure out what was #1 that year):

No, not the part of the scene with the cat house*, but all the usage of CB radio to communicate between truckers, the Bandit, Foxy Lady, and Cledus (and Fred the Basset Hound). While Citizens' Band radio --CB radio for short-- had a spike in use in the early 70s due to the speed limits created to fight the gas crisis, songs such as Convoy and movies such as Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy** caused CB radio to explode in popularity.

You know it's big when the President gets on a CB.
From Ridiculous 70s memes.

Even I, who wasn't allowed to watch Smokey and the Bandit (something about bad words and women doing "unladylike things"), knew of CB radio. I remember as a kid getting a brochure from a shoe store of all places*** that contained a conversion list of what all the CB "Ten Codes" were. At some point I also obtained a picture story about a kid who learns about CB radio and gets a base station as a gift, and when he hears a family friend (a trucker) call for help on the CB he gets his parents to call for help from the Fire Department. While both the book and brochure are long gone, they obviously left a lasting impression. 

I, like many kids of that era, had a pair of walkie talkies that were basically crap. The concept of having true portable communication was simply out of reach unless you owned a CB.

And no, we never owned a CB radio. 

From the 1978 Radio Shack catalog, page 160.
From radioshackcatalogs.com.

Although they were all over the place.

From the Amazon of 1978, the Sears catalog.
From the Fall/Winter 1978 Sears catalog, page 1174.
Yes, that was PAGE 1174.
From christmas.musetechnical.com.

Even at Kmart...

This was back when Kmart had a good reputation.
This is a 1976 Kmart at for CB Radios.
From 42444189@N04 on Flickr.

For starters, my parents weren't well off, and they considered items such as a CB radio an extravagance. I mean, we didn't get a color television until 1980, or a "nice" stereo system of any sort until ~1978. Our Christmas budget was $20, so my brother and I would comb through the Sears catalogs trying to find enough bang for the buck to stretch that $20 as far as it could go. Even then, my parents would nix certain presents, such as some of those Battlestar Galactica toys because they shot small projectiles. Later, when I had a job --and a car-- and I was told I could buy a car stereo once I saved up enough money, my dad flat out refused to let me get the stereo I'd saved for because "it was a waste of money".****

So you can imagine that my parents didn't want to buy a CB radio.

However, some family friends did have CB radios, and one year when we went on an extended weekend's vacation with them they offered to loan us one of their CBs as well as an antenna with a magnet mount and a felt bottom so as to not scratch the paint job on the car. The idea was that we would be able to coordinate on things such as stopping for lunch. Well, there was also just chatting while driving as well, the sort of thing that CB radio is really good at. The family friends talked up how great it was to chat like that and make the multi-hour drive that much easier.

Still, my parents refused to borrow a CB radio for the trip.

I suspect that my dad didn't want to risk scratching the paint on his then new station wagon, but he probably also thought that using a CB radio was "beneath" him for some reason. Or maybe he was concerned that I might hear some profanity, but given that I heard plenty of profanity all over the place (especially from my fellow Catholic students) I thought that possibility rather silly. But my parents kind of lived in an alternate universe where PG films were considered risqué.*****

As time went on, my interest in CB radio waned as my teen years went on and I gained access to a car and (more importantly) a car stereo. Well, there was also that thing about girls, I suppose, but to a geeky teen that was more hypothetical until I went to college.

***

When I worked at Radio Shack after college, I was less concerned about CB radio than shortwave radio and the burgeoning PC market, but we did sell our share of CB equipment. I used to get copies of Popular Communications magazine from bookstores, and I'd occasionally skim the CB Radio column, but it didn't have that much interest for me.

Ironically enough, I found out much later that the CB Radio craze of the 70s and 80s led to quite a few CB dedicated magazines across the globe.

Yes, even with CB Radio, sex sells.
From CB Action magazine out of Australia.

And in the UK, too.
From CB World magazine out of the UK.

Somebody alert the French that
sex sells CB magazines! From France CB
magazine, from... well, you know where.

Despite my history with radio as a hobby, I hadn't been that interested in trying out CB radio much over the years. I mean, I did own one for a while when I was "given" a cheap model as part of a yard sale purchase of a scanner radio, but I believe I gave it away to an electronics recycling event years ago.# It's just that CB radio does have its share of cranks and misfits and racists on the air, and despite that there's the perception that CB is an "old" technology and "nobody uses it" anymore.

Uh, yeah, about that latter part...

From a Loves Truck Stop in Indiana
in September 2024.

Loves is one of the places that I stop at while driving on the highway because I know I can usually find a clean restroom and a decent cup of coffee. So when I was inside, grabbing a drink, I saw some Cobra CB radios for sale and I quickly snapped that pic you see above. 

So if Loves considered CB radios important enough to truck drivers that they continue to stock them at their numerous stores throughout the country, then it's not so obsolete as I thought. 

Another thing happened over the past year that caught my attention was Hurricane Helene in the Fall of 2024. When the remnants of Helene hit the interior of the US, parts of the Appalachian Mountains centering around western North Carolina found themselves without power for well over a couple of weeks. In those situations, cell phones are useless without an active tower network, so it fell to CB radio and amateur radio to provide communications. I kept up with how things were progressing over that month, and I have to admit I was impressed by the response provided by both groups of radio operators (with some overlap between the two, to be honest).

With that knowledge out there, I began keeping an eye on YouTube for people promoting CB radio as a hobby. Again, there are the cranks and misfits out there, but there are plenty of people who keep the hobby alive. A lot of them are amateur radio operators (colloquially known as 'hams') who originally came from CB radio and still keep up with what's going on in CB.

I also found a recording of an actual LP made to explain how CB Radio worked:

Because that's what you did in the 70s to explain things

to people: you made a record of it.

While I'm not going to go out of my way to acquire a CB radio (at least not at the moment), I'll be keeping my eyes open if a used one comes my way. There's plenty of old radios around, so you never know what might appear at a local yard sale. And besides, an older radio could be yet another project for me to work on in my retirement years.

So no, I don't have a CB radio at the moment, but I think that'll change in the next year or two.

*True story: I was assigned in high school to read John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and the references of "cat houses" in the novel left me all confused. I finally asked in class just what the hell a cat house was, and boy did the class laugh at that one. (It's slang for a house of prostitution, if you don't know.) In my defense I knew I could never ask my parents, because they'd just get all offended or something. And yes, I have asked innocent questions about that sort of thing before and had it all blow up out of proportion, so I learned to simply not bring it up.

**Yes, the movie was based on the song and came out a couple of years after the song.

***The shoes I was forced to wear for school were Buster Browns. Damn, I hated those things. Sure, gym shoes weren't allowed, but surely my parents could have chosen something less dorky looking that those things.

****I had to get a Sears branded stereo that wasn't very good, but at least it did play cassettes. For a while I don't think they wanted me to get even a cassette player. Given that I played a TON of Heavy Metal in the car that I knew they wouldn't have approved of, they probably didn't want that cassette player.

*****I wasn't allowed to see R-rated movies, despite my ability to watch them on cable television all the time, until I went and saw Platoon with some friends (and yes, I was 17 at the time, so I was "legal"). As a college classmate once said, "Red needs to get out from under his parents' thumb."

#I tried hunting for it for this post, but no dice, so I figured it's long gone. If I stumble on it later, I'll provide an update.

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 3: "This is 64 WDCR, Broadcasting from Kennedy Union..."

One of the goals I had when I went to college was to experience some things that I knew I wasn't going to have a chance to do again. That explains why I decided to minor in History and Philosophy despite being a Physics Major*, and also why I took a class in Fencing my Senior year.** I also participated in Model UN for a few years as part of the delegation that UD sent to New York for the National Model UN Conference.

It also explains why I became a radio DJ for my Senior year.

No, this is not me, it's the late Howard Hesseman
in his role as Dr. Johnny Fever on the late 70s-early 80s
television show WKRP in Cincinnati.
From the New York Times' obituary on Howard,
who died in 2022 at the age of 81.

Although it's long since been replaced by WUDR "Flyer Radio" 99.5/98.1 FM, UD had a student run radio station on AM radio when I attended. The university actually owned a commercial radio station at the time, WVUD 99.9 FM, which broadcast from Kennedy Union, but by the time I attended the university the student-run Rock format had become a purely commercial enterprise with a Soft Rock format, which very few students actually listened to.*** 

But there was another radio station nestled in the student union, and that was WDCR, AM 640.

It was designed as a completely student run station, inheriting WVUD's old student-run design, and although it was on AM --and was only broadcast via carrier signal on the power lines to the Union and the university's dorm buildings-- you could sign up for a DJ slot and spin the LPs. The only drawback was that by the time I did decide to sign up for a DJ shift my senior year, the format had changed from "you can grab an hour or two and play what you want" to "we're playing a primarily Rock and Alternative format just like a professional radio station". 

Alas, I couldn't imitate this scene from WKRP. I did
look into my yearbooks to see if there was anything
worthy of a scan, but nope. One yearbook had WDCR
as "FM 64", not "AM 64". /sigh

Since I didn't really have any ideas about what to play, only that I wanted to be on the radio, I was fine with that. My freshman year roommate (and current housemate) and I secured a slot for a couple of hours in the mid-morning once or twice a week, and away we went.

Two of my other housemates had been DJs on the station already, so that helped to ease me into the job. The knowledge that people mostly heard us when they crossed through the lobby area of Kennedy Union meant that I didn't really have to worry about putting myself on the spot.**** I did come up with a name --'Mister Physics', which was actually one of the nicknames given me by my friends at UD-- but really, nobody cared what I was called as long as I worked the playlist and had a bit of banter here and there with my housemate as co-host. 

Although I knew about 2/3 of the songs on the playlist, that other 1/3 were a real eye opener. You'd think that Album Oriented Rock stations were all alike, and maybe they are now in the era of corporate sameness and station centralization, but radio stations even within the same format all had their own little quirks. For example, WTUE-FM in Dayton had a different enough playlist than WEBN-FM in Cincinnati that I enjoyed WTUE much more than WEBN when I visited home. 

This was the first song I ever played as a DJ;

I'd never heard it until that moment.

By the time I had a DJ shift, radio had been changing. While albums did exist, and I queued up enough records over my DJ tenure, the music had already been migrating to tape machines. I knew CDs weren't too far behind, given that WVUD did have a CD system in place --we got VUD's hand-me-downs for equipment-- and when I was given a tour of the WVUD studios I got to see the new systems in action. 

***

You know, having that one shift wasn't a big time commitment, but having it that last year of college meant everything to me. It was fun, it was relaxing, and I got to enjoy the illusion of being in control of what people listened to on the radio. 

We did have a cast of characters there at the station. There was the conservative commentator who couldn't crack a joke if his life depended on it, the one station higher-up who absolutely loved Duran Duran to the point of her following them when they went on tour over the summer, the news reader who read the news impeccably and was always dressed to the nines but had such a conceited attitude I still remember her to this day, and the fellow DJ who --if given the chance-- would queue up only Van Halen.

"How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?"
From WKRP in Cincinnati.

Being a DJ meant I did have to do some work at the station other than just my shift. I was supposed to come up with a "promo" for my spot as well has do a couple of other odds and ends, but that never really happened. My mind kind of works in weird ways, and creative endeavors can take a while to finish. A common complaint about my projects over the years is that my projects look really disjointed and have huge gaps until I manage to pull it all together at the last moment. Yes, I know, it's crunch (to borrow the software development term), but it does work for me. However, I never got to finish up those other things as a DJ because I just never got a real deadline to work against. As for my promo, I had the idea of using Monty Python-esque voices over Sousa's The Liberty Bell March, but I never really sat down to work out how it ought to flow. The Station Manager wasn't pleased that I kind of half-assed it, but I had other priorities at the time and doing a promo wasn't one of them.

When I graduated, I explored working a shift at Dayton's local Fine Arts station, WDPR 89.5 FM (that was the frequency back then, I think it's 89.9 now), but I never got a callback. That was fine with me, since I had moved back to Cincinnati that summer and really never left. But still, I do have the radio bug in me, and it hasn't quite gone away.

In a quirk of fate, when my son went away to college, he decided to pick up a DJ shift at his university's radio station.***** Due to simulcasting over the internet, I got to hear his shift on Tuesday afternoons quite a bit while I worked. He kept that up for a couple of years until he spent a semester abroad at Lancaster University in England, but that my son walked the same path I did still makes me smile to this day.

*Yes, I minored in Math, because that was expected of a Physics Major. After all, you were going to take most of the classes to qualify for it anyway. As for Philosophy, the University of Dayton had a requirement of 12 hours (4 classes' worth) of either Religion or Philosophy, so it only took me two more classes to have enough to minor in it. History, however, was something I geeked out over and so I took as many classes as I could.

**I was told that if I wanted to meet girls I should take Ballroom Dancing, because the girls outnumbered the boys in that class by something like 2:1. As it turned out, I was already dating by then, so I didn't need that encouragement.

***Again, another acquaintance told me that girls really really loved listening to Air Supply as 'make-out' music, which... let's just say I was really skeptical of that one. But yes, he did have a cassette of Air Supply's hits, and yes there were times when I heard it coming from the door to his dorm room.

****Yes, you'd think that me being a shy introvert would mean that I couldn't do a DJ shift, but I found that being merely a voice behind a microphone made it much easier to deal with. I also got to hone my Kermit the Frog impression, although it does make my throat hurt when I do it for more than a few minutes.

*****The lucky bastard got to play whatever he wanted; I'm jealous. Here's a link to the station. Yes, you can listen live during the school year.

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 2: On The Beautiful Blue Danube

 

I used to listen in at 5:00 UTC to Radio Österreich

International on 6155 kHz. It was broadcast to

Europe, but was an easy catch for those of us living

in Eastern North America.

All of the global events of the late 80s and early 90s led to a spike in shortwave radio interest. I remember during the beginning of the First Gulf War one of our local television reporters had a 3 minute piece on shortwave radios, and he demonstrated how they worked using a Realistic DX-440. I found out a bit later that the reporter was a shortwave enthusiast, so he was happy to promote the hobby, although he did tell me that the television producer had the radio around only because it had 10 memory selections, not because of its shortwave capabilities.

When I took a job at Radio Shack after my graduation*, I viewed it more from the lens of an electronics and radio enthusiast. Obviously anybody who has had to deal with Radio Shack over the decades can tell you I was fooling myself, as my naïveté was crushed shortly after starting there. Still, the best part of working at Radio Shack was when one of the ham radio operators dropped by to talk shop. Or when the CB or scanner fans came in for equipment. Or, on those rare occasions when someone shopping for a shortwave radio stopped by.**

After my time at Radio Shack ended (fired for low sales numbers) and I landed a job as a lab tech, I still kept up with shortwave radio.

While at UD, a friend gave me their old Knight Kit
Star Roamer. I tried and failed to get my dad interested
in shortwave; he listened to the radio all the time, 
but no dice on this. I honestly don't know what
happened to the old Star Roamer.
This pic is from Boatanchor Pix.

I joined the North American Shortwave Association (NASWA) and began receiving their monthly bulletins.*** Before that time I only knew of myself and a couple of other people who were interested in shortwave, but here was an entire organization devoted to shortwave radio. I also found the NASWA area on the GEnie online community, and I began participating in their forums.

I think I still have some of my old copies
of The NASWA Journal around (this is the cover
of one of them), but thankfully worldradiohistory.com
has PDF versions available for viewing.

***

During that time, I kept a log of my shortwave listening habits. 

Yeah, I know. My writing isn't the greatest.

Nestled among the "official" stations are a few stations that don't fit the mold of a traditional shortwave broadcaster: WFRC and WSKY "Whiskey Radio". Those are pirate radio stations. 

As long as radio has existed, there have been people who have wanted to skirt the rules and broadcast on their own. The reasons are myriad, from people wanting to hear their music played on radio (such as John Peel and Radio London of the 1960s), to people broadcasting with a political slant, to people just wanting to do their own thing. I knew of Radio Newyork International and its brief period of "free radio" broadcasting off the coast of New York City, but when I stumbled across this book at a local bookstore,

I suppose it was inevitable, but eventually Andrew Yoder
was caught by the FCC for broadcasting illegally himself.

I quickly snapped it up and began reading. 

From Pirate Radio Stations: Tuning in to Underground
Broadcasts (1st Edition) by Andrew Yoder.

When I realized there was a club that tailored to people chasing pirates and clandestine communications, The Association of Clandestine Enthusiasts (The ACE), I forked over a few dollars for an annual membership.

I actually have this copy! I haven't
stumbled across it lately, however.
From The Internet Archive.

***

So... why have I never mentioned any of this before? Outside of the obvious answer that this is a gaming blog, and this really doesn't have anything to do with gaming at all. Well, after that high point of the early-mid 90s, I haven't really listened to shortwave all that much.

The ICOM IC-R70, well known for being able to suss out
faint stations. I bought a used one in 1994, and sold it in 2000
when I bought the Grundig 800. From RigReference.com.

I got married, changed jobs (twice), and worked all sorts of crazy hours over the years. I became a parent, and as any parent will tell you, that sucks up a lot of your remaining free time. Shortwave radio isn't my only hobby, either, and those hobbies came more to the forefront in the late 90s and beyond.

There's also the little problem of money.

I don't have the money to keep up with all of my hobbies, so I had to pick and choose which hobbies to pay attention to. And in the late 90s, that meant giving up my memberships in NASWA and The ACE. Without that direct connection to the hobby, my interest began to wane. 

It also needs to be said that after that mini-boom of interest from the (first) Gulf War, shortwave radio began a steady decline.

I had a feeling that the shortwave boom wasn't going to last, and I was proven right as shortwave radio was eventually eclipsed by the rise of the internet. It took much longer than I thought it would, however, because audio and video communications were still limited by network bandwidth. Downloading the first trailer of The Fellowship of the Ring from ~1999 took most of the evening and night on our dial-up internet connection at home, and listening to the radio over the internet required faster speeds than dial-up. Eventually, however, various forms of high speed internet made their way across the globe, and with this new form of communication the old began to seem an antique.

The major shortwave broadcasters began to dry up. Here's just a few of the stations that you can no longer hear (or hear easily) where I live:

• The BBC World Service stopped broadcasting to North America and Australia in 2001, citing "changing habits", and relying instead on rebroadcasts on American radio stations.
• Radio Deutsche Welle dropped their English service to North America in 2003, and gradually reduced their shortwave footprint over the successive years to Africa only.
• Radio Österreich International (Austria), a favorite station of mine, discontinued broadcasts in 2003.
• Radio Nederland and Radio Poland ceased operations in 2012.

Some of the decline in the older broadcasters is due to the changing technology, but there are other reasons for the ceasing of shortwave broadcasts as well. Chief among them is the energy cost to broadcast via shortwave. 

Powering a shortwave station is not cheap. Running a 500,000 watt station takes a lot of energy, and if you don't have extenuating circumstances to keep broadcasting (the Cold War, for example) eventually the bean counters start to get antsy about "throwing money away". 

In a post-Cold War environment, the venerable Voice of America Bethany Station --about 15-20 miles from my house-- closed in 1994 and is now a park. The station facility itself is a museum, open to the public.****

***

Despite the decline of the traditional shortwave broadcasters, I kept up with shortwave radio when I could. As I mentioned above, my decline in free time meant that sitting down to actually listen to shortwave radio became a bit of a luxury. Moving to our current house meant I had the space to put up an outside antenna, but that took a back seat to house repairs and kids' play spaces.

And to be fair, I also got more heavily invested in video and board games as well. This blog, for example, came along at the end of the 2000s, but I'd been playing video and board games regularly for decades before that.

Still, I purchased a Grundig Satellit 800 when it was first released in mid-late 2000, because while I couldn't afford one of the $1000 professional receivers (such as the Japan Radio NRD-535 or the Drake R8), I could afford a $500 Satellit 800 which had similar capabilities to those kilobuck receivers. 

The Drake R8, made in Miamisburg, Ohio.
Definitely a "holy grail" radio among those in the hobby.
From the late Universal Radio's website.

I also bought a couple of tube radios along the way, thinking that I'd like to have one to putter around with as the kids grew up and I retired.

Such as the Hallicrafters SX-100:

It's much heavier than it looks.

I've had this radio since 2006, the last time I went to the Dayton Hamvention, and trust me, lugging this thing around was not my idea of fun. 

The old tube shortwave radios from the 1930s up through the advent of all transistor models in the 60s are nicknamed "boat anchors" due to their bulk and weight, and while the Hallicrafters SX-100 that I have above isn't the heaviest of those boat anchors, lugging a radio weighing 42 lbs/19 kg back to my car 3/4 of a mile away (~1.25 km) wasn't what I'd call fun.***** However, I'd bought the thing for $100, it worked, and I was determined to get it home as the centerpiece of my listening station.

Funny thing about that... I never got a listening station put together. 

I mean, I did get an outside antenna put up, complete with ground rod and lightning arrestor, by running a wire from our porch to the kids' wooden swing set#. That antenna really brought in the shortwave stations, but I never got the space in the basement to get a true listening station in place while that was my home office. 

There was also the little problem of Hurricane Ike in 2008, whose remnants of met a cold front coming down from Canada right in the middle of the Ohio Valley, turning what would have been 3-4 inches of steady rain into hurricane force winds over the course of 12+ hours. This area is used to tornados, but the houses and infrastructure here are decidedly NOT built to withstand hurricane force winds. Miraculously, the antenna survived Ike, but a few months later the weakened supports were brought down in an ice storm, and that was that.

By then, my wife had given me an ultimatum to move my home office out of the basement and up into the dining room, as I had a habit of getting bronchitis every winter since we lived in the house due to the chilly and damp conditions in the basement.##

My trusty old DX-440 became my go-to portable radio for the garage and the back porch, and it still behaves like a champ today. The Satellit 800 is still in the basement, and when I'm down there for any length of time I turn it on and listen to FM radio on it. That old Hallicrafers S20R that I first became acquainted with at UD I eventually took home with me, but it needs a complete rebuild, so that's relegated to basement storage for now. But the newer Hallicrafters, the SX-100, went onto a storage rack and stayed there until I began cleaning this Fall.

The Grundig Satellit 800, when I brought it out of the
basement to listen to while I was repairing the deck last fall.

When I brought the boat anchor upstairs and put it on the table as you saw above, I plugged it in and hoped that it would fire up. It did, kinda. Several tubes had blown, and it wouldn't shock me if I opened it up and discovered several resistors and caps were in bad shape too, but other parts of the radio did start up and bathed me in a yellowish glow. It is definitely going to be a project for me to restore it to its former glory, but in my retirement years I'm up for the challenge.

Oh, and the SX-100 is now permanently out of the basement. I am thinking about ways to configure my son's old room to create a listening station in there, as long as I share it with my wife so she can have a place to play her guitar.

So I've got a future with shortwave, it's just changed so much over the past 35 years or so that I have a hard time recognizing what it is today.

*Yes, the old Hallicrafters radio came with me when I graduated. I had to store it in my closet for a while until it found a home at my (then) girlfriend's apartment while she was at grad school.

**The worst part about working at Radio Shack? How long do you have, because I've a list...

***One of my History professors at UD strongly suggested to the class that if we were interested in history that we ought to join our local or state history organization. Typically you could join for a pretty minimal cost, and you could then gain access to and support research of all sorts of topics. I took his advice to heart and joined the Ohio Historical Society for several years, and when I got serious about Shortwave listening I joined clubs to support the hobby as well. Hence NASWA and The ACE.

****I bet if you asked the average park goer what the Voice of America was, they'd think you were talking about the Country Music Festival that happens there every year, or that it's some patriotic thing ala Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". Or maybe the album (and lead track) from Sammy Hagar when he was a solo artist in the 1980s.

*****To this day I'm still amazed that I didn't injure my back.

#I used a piece of wood to both use as a makeshift flagpole for the kids so I could run up a pirate flag --pretending you were a pirate on the high seas is a rite of passage, Pirates of the Caribbean movies or not-- and to attach my random wire antenna to.

##The dampness problems were fixed by a dehumidifier. The cold... Well, I need to fix the foundation first before I'll put up insulation on the walls. Yeah, that's not happening any time soon.

#Blaugust2025