WICHITA FALLS MAN

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09-13-2023 – There are three local hotels, a small, medium, and large, under construction. To hobby radio enthusiasts, this simply means more scanner radio targets. While not usually the most exciting thing to monitor, I can tell you that hotels are sometimes the scene of interesting activity. It doesn’t hurt to keep them in rotation on your scanner radio. UPDATE: The big one is open for business.

09-13-2023 – We've had our share of Radio & Television repair shops back in the day. Now, they’re all but gone. These days, radios and TVs last a long time. When they break, you don’t replace parts, you replace boards. By the time they break, a new one with the latest bells & whistles was probably long overdue.

09-11-2023 - Amateur (ham) Radio Operators, have you considered doing a "pop-up" special event? For example, pull up on the parking lot of the Meteor Crater in Arizona, pick a 20-meter frequency, and start calling CQ as a Meteor Crater Special Event". Pick an interesting location near you. You can have details on obtaining a contact certificate at your QRZ page or your personal website. It might help to have a certificate already designed and ready to mail, printed on demand. Anyone can do that with MS Word, Wordperfect, or similar programs.

09-11-2023 - Have you heard of CB Radio shops, chrome shops, and other advertising on CB Channel 19? Some of them have strong signals. A few are louder than local stations just a few miles from me. That's a lot of power! Sometimes, I hear truckers answer these stations, wanting to inquire about their offerings, only to find out they're hundreds of miles away. The distance might not matter to some truckers since they might be headed in that direction anyway.

09-11-2023 - I was stationed at the now-defunct Savanna Army Depot in Savanna, Illinois from 1974-1975. There, I guarded what the military calls Special Weapons. They were stored in earth-covered bunkers. You know the type of weapons I'm talking about. We had a V-100 armored vehicle standing by for the Back-Up Alert Force. Sometimes, when I wasn't patrolling the bunkers, I'd sit in the V-100, crank up the "boat anchor" VHF radio, and listen to radio traffic in the area. Boat anchor is Hobby Radio-speak for big and heavy. Ours was not equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun like the one in the photo.

09-11-2023 - Thunder got me up early this morning. On the scanner, I heard two unidentified aircraft on 123.450 MHz talking about the weather. This is one of the unofficial air-to-air frequencies used by some pilots. Now, should I put on some coffee or go back to bed?

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09-10-2023 - A female police officer stopped at a pay phone (remember those) and called her boyfriend. Somehow, the phone and her epaulet-mounted police radio speaker-microphone got together, keyed the microphone, and broadcast every word of what she was going to do to her boyfriend when she got off work. The scanning community got their money's worth that day.

09-10-2023 - When traveling, the best Amateur Radio repeater directory is a local ham monitoring 146.520 FM simplex. After all, on which of those 30+ machines listed will you get an answer to your call? The local ham knows. But, is anyone monitoring .52? That's another issue.

09-10-2023 - I think it was the first Star Trek movie with Chris Pine as James T. Kirk when, early in the show, you could spot several dual-band or tri-band mobile antennas hastily placed on the ship's bridge. They stood out like a "sore thumb" and totally out of place for that century. Some ham working on the set had to leave his mark!