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Old 08-16-2014, 08:39 PM   #32
Mr. Ham
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Join Date: Aug 2014
Posts: 95
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I live in Pennsylvania, in Pennsylvania there is a fee for the vanity plate + the regular plate fee - charged when you get the vanity plate. You can keep the plate on the vehicle until it wears out and then you have to pay for another plate.

It does you no good to have a vanity plate here.
There are no real hams within 50 road miles of my house.
The people that are hams - are usually found on some rag chew net on the Hf, such as the Rooster Net in the morning, You have to check in X amount of times and then you have to crow like a rooster while standing on a chair to be accepted into the group. Sometimes they make you crow several times until they get a crow they like..
At night they check into the SubBelt Net or some other dumb net.

Conversations are mostly personal and done on simplex - so no repeater owner throws them off the repeater. The clubs are clique's and the people only uses their walkie talkie sparingly once a week at the club net to give their no traffic and then turn their handheld back off so they don't kill their batteries..

You can call CQ on 146.520 until your face turns blue - even out on I 80 and no one will come back to you.. Everyone is too busy screwing other people, making money, screwing other hams - feuds, and talking on their cell phones or checking into nets on the HF to be bothered with the FM....

I actually stopped in at a hams house and asked him what his big antenna's were for and what the letters and numbers were for on his license plate. When he told me he was a ham, I screwed with him and asked him if that was some type of CB radio.
He didn't have a real good answer, he just said that he and his wife were both hams and that they operated simplex - mostly 6 meters or 40 meters when he worked construction. Then when he retired, he didn't have any reason to talk anymore - because he never really talked to anyone other then the local group and his wife.

When I shook his hand and said - oh, by the way, my name is XXX and my call sign is CCXCC - he just about crapped his pants..
I didn't get an invite to come back and I didn't get an invite to come into his house and see his shack.. He grew up in the same small town I live in and grew up and went to school with my parents in the 40's and 50's and went to the same catholic school..

I think that the days of people being proud that they are hams is over.
Most of them are only out for themselves and the other ones got their license after the code requirement and or by illicit means and so the license doesn't mean that much to them. They use it when it is convenient - like a telephone and the rest of the time they don't even turn their radio on.. Some - their wives don't let them have radios in the house or antenna's in the yard, or on their vehicles - so all they have is the handheld...
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