Scanner Tales: Hamming it up since the 80’s
I took my ham radio test in the mid 1980’s, along with a group of scanner hobbyists I hung with. Matt, Scott, Greg, Doug and I all went to the same 6-week class, and we all got our licenses thru this class. Matt actually passed his 5WPM code test as well as the Novice written in Week 5 then his Tech written in Week 6 while the rest of us didn’t pass the code until Week 6. Because of this he got his Novice call about the same time we all got our Technician’s; his Tech call came a couple weeks later so his call was newer than ours even though he was licensed before us. Scott and my callsigns were one letter off, Greg and Doug’s were a little newer due to some delayed paperwork.
Matt got his General pretty quickly and eventually made Extra, the rest of us stuck with our Techs for years. Matt had to pass the 13WPM code test to get his General, the rest of us barely squeaked by to pass the 5WPM test. I finally got my General a few years ago. By then the code tests were long gone. I have promised myself that I would get my Extra, I have the books and just have to devote enough time and effort to study for the test. I think that if I stop writing Tales and actually study, I might get thru it.
I have taken the Extra test a couple times just to see how well I would do. The first time (just before Covid) I did pretty well, getting 27 of 50 questions right. 7 more and I would have passed. Not bad considering I never cracked a book on it. The next time was right after Covid restrictions were lifted and I did quite a bit worse. The guy scoring the sheet had to double-check to make sure he had the right answer key it was that bad. That wasn’t entirely my fault, the testing venue was smack in the middle of the hamfest with lots of noise and distractions. In addition, the test questions were printed poorly, and the margins were messed up, cutting off some of the ends of the questions. At least they did not charge for the tests.
I have Uncle Gordy’s book in my bathroom for daily reading. I also have the HRO and DXE catalogs there, those are much more fun to read during my special time, so I don’t spend to much time trying to memorize questions and answers. I am pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADD, every time I do start going thru the Extra Exam book, I get distracted and start looking up something in the catalogs.
So, let’s go back to the mid 1980’s in north suburban Chicagoland. The five of us newly minted ham radio licensees started off using the repeaters from the club that sponsored our class and testing. The day my license showed up in the mail I excitedly called Matt or Greg on the repeater, and we spoke for a few minutes. Now, most of us were cops (me) dispatchers (Matt and Greg), reporters (Doug) former firefighters (Scott and I) or former dispatchers (again Scott, and I). We all were much more familiar with “police style” phonetics (A-Adam, B-Boy, C-Charles etc.) and not the ham-style (A-Alpha, B-Bravo, C-Charlie etc.). When we gave our shiny, brand new call signs. I was “Nora 9 John Ida George”, not “November Niner Juliet India Golf”.
The president of the club broke into our QSO on the repeater and yelled at us for “using the ‘wrong’ phonetics”. Well, this went over with us like a lead balloon. We would have been fine if he contacted us privately and asked us to use the preferred phonetics while on the repeater but the way he did so publicly was dead wrong. We all resigned our club memberships on the spot. I did so verbally to him on the repeater in a spiteful tit-for-tat. I probably shouldn’t have done so but he really torqued me off!
Some of us joined other local ham clubs afterwards. I joined a couple mostly for the Autopatch access. Remember back in the 80’s cell phones were pretty much restricted to the uber-rich and drug dealers so being able to make phone calls from the car was a huge deal. I had to remind my girlfriends repeatedly to be careful what they say and how they say it when I called “on the Patch”. One girlfriend just didn’t seem to get it; I finally had to stop using “the Patch” to call her and find a payphone.
Pretty soon we decided repeater life wasn’t for us and started using 146.520 simplex instead. While this is pretty much dead these days, in the 80’s it was still pretty busy, especially in the Chicago area. We decided to find a nice quiet simplex frequency we could camp out on and not bother anyone else. We eventually settled on 145.770. This was at the time allocated for experimental and simplex voice. I set up a VOX recorder on it at work (connected to a VHF antenna at about 100 feet up a monopole) and heard no traffic on it for over a month.
Around 1990 or 1991 most of us in the North Shore area started buying Kenwood TM-731A dual-banders. These were great for our purposes, a simple mod allowed for cross-band repeat and we all had the PL Decoders as well. We started using these at our homes as well as in the cars. Each of us had a pair of UHF frequencies (like 446.6625 etc.) that we would use as “Link” frequencies, all with a common PL tone. We each had a “link” frequency for our mobile radios (445.xxxx) and home (446.xxxx). There were no repeaters in the 440 or 441 ranges, they all were from 442 thru 444.975 in the area at the time. We all knew the other guys’ “Link” frequencies so if I was close to Greg’s house I could access his Link to get base-station performance from my HT or mobile. It was a great system, and we used it for years without issues.
Years later one of us got a letter in the mail from some hams in the south suburbs who told us we would have to move our simplex operations off of 145.770. It seems that the new “South Suburban Digital Radio Group” (or whatever they called themselves, I really don’t remember) had declared that they were now the coordinating body for ham radio digital operations in northern Illinois and had allocated 145.770 to packet radio. Packet had been getting more and more popular at the time, and they needed spectrum.
I called a friend who was the Illinois Repeater Association frequency coordinator at the time and asked him about these guys. He had never heard of them, nor did anyone else. They were apparently self-appointed and had no recognition by any real coordinating body. I then fired off a letter from the newly formed “Simplex Users Group” and advised them that 145.770 has been allocated for Simplex Voice use only in northern Illinois. When they replied I told them that we did not want to get into a war with them, but we had been operating on 145.770 for almost a decade and would continue to do so. If they wished to share the channel with us, they should be sure we were not operating on it before they commenced operations to avoid interference. We would do the same. This was not acceptable to them, so we told them to take it up with the ARRL and the real frequency coordinators. That was the last we heard from them; I found out later that they found a different frequency to use for their packet operations.
The only other users we ever heard on 145.770 back in the day were a small group of old guys in the west suburbs that had a regular sched in the mornings. From listening to them they were aware of us, but they were close enough to each other where we could do our thing at the same time and they could hear each other over our operations. We did chat with them a few times when we were in their area and we co-existed peacefully for years.
As several of us were also involved with the Chicago Area Radio Monitoring Association (CARMA) at the time CARMA adopted 145.770 as its ham simplex frequency as well. Many CARMA members who were hams used this at events or for general chit-chat over the years. When I moved from the area 10 years ago it was still being used.
Now that I live here in Arizona, we have been using 145.770 in my neighborhood for a group of hams on our weekly sched.
So, once again, back to our group of hams in the 80’s and 90’s. When one of us bought a new type of radio and liked it one or more of the others would usually get one as well. Matt and I often did so. I got a FTC1143, then he did. He got a TM-731A, then so did Greg, Doug and I did.
While the Kenwood TM-731A was our mobile and base radio of choice most of us also had various other radios. I had a couple different Icom mobiles, like the IC-2800. My 2800 was purchased from a friend who had it in his car for several years. He was a heavy smoker and always had an RC Cola or Dr. Pepper in hand. In the car he seemed to spill as much as he drank, and his car was filthy as one would expect. The radio installed in his car was no exception. He sold it to me for $40, a real steal. Sure, it was encrusted with dried up soda pop, cigarette ashes and solidified smoke but it worked, and the radio itself was fine. I figured I could replace the control head and microphone and still come out ahead in the deal.
I decided to try to salvage the control head and mic first. I took them all apart and separated the plastic bits from the rest. Then I went to the local Walgreens and bought a big box of denture tablets. I then put a dozen or so in hot water and soaked the plastic bits overnight. I did the same for the glass cover of the LCD display. I then took cleaned the mic cable as best I could. When I was done the control head and mic looked almost brand new. For an investment of $40 and another $5 worth of Efferdent I had a great radio that looked brand new. I saw the guy I bought it from a few months later and he couldn’t believe it was the same radio.
Around the same time many of us were also getting into GMRS. One popular radio that many of us had was the Icom U16 and H16. These were 16-channel programmable radios. The U16 (UHF) would program down to 440 MHz. and as far as 480 MHz. This allowed us to use them on our GMRS and ham repeaters and monitor our local police channels on 470 MHz. The H16 worked on the 2-Meter ham band as well as allowing us to listen to the local VHF police and fire channels as well as the marine channels as we all lived near Lake Michigan.
Another popular radio for us at the time was the FTC-1123 and FTC-1143 portables from Yaesu. These were 10 channel VHF or UHF portables that normally would be set up for 150-160 MHz. (1123 model) or 460-470 MHz. (1143). One could however flip them to 140-150 or 440-450 with a keyboard command. While this would erase all the memories, they were easy to program from the keyboard. They were nice and compact, and we used them for both ham and GMRS, just not at the same time. Matt still has his and he fired it up a few months ago for grins and giggles and it still works great. The Yaesu’s had analog S-Meters on them, and they worked great even if they were small.
The Yaesu FT-470 however was our real ham radio portable workhorse at the time. This neat little portable was cheaper than the Icoms and worked just as well. Most of us had these. There were a wide variety of other radios in use by us back then, including other Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood and other brands as well as adding our channels to our Motorola radios when we could.
None of us really got into HF work back then. I dabbled in some 10M stuff once they opened that up to Techs and Matt did some HF work as he had his General but for the most part it was 2M, 440 and GMRS for us. I had a couple different 220 radios now and then but never really caught that bug.
When I started to handle the radio maintenance at work I programmed our 145.770 simplex frequency into the mobile radios in the squad cars, labeled as “Unused”. There was one other ham on our small department and one of our dispatchers (Ted) was also a ham and we all knew what that channel was. I also put it in the backup radio in the Comm Center, again so our dispatch and I could use it when it was slow. Eventually I even programmed it in the VHF Quantar base station and created a hidden button on the dispatch console that only Ted and I knew about. That worked really well!
While I left GMRS for the most part after a while I stuck with ham radio. Up until the time I moved out of state I used 145.770 all the time. It was always the selected channel in my dual bander. Now that we have our little group here in Arizona, I still have it in several radios and if not selected in one of my ham rigs at home (like my IC-7100, AT-D578UV or IC-705) I keep a watch on it in one of the scanners.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s one could take a trip anywhere in the Midwest and find activity on 146.520 or 446.000 at almost any time in almost any location. Driving to Hamvention in Dayton one would hear it active non-stop. Occasionally we would do the Midwest version of Mountain Topping by going to the observation area atop the Sears Tower or Hancock building in Chicago with an HT and see how far we could make it on 4 watts. Contacts into Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan were common on simplex. A couple of us liked to go to a place near Lake Geneva WI, where we found a local high point that allowed us to communicate back to the Chicago area.
Another fun thing was temperature inversions, where a layer of warm air gets stuck over a layer of colder air. These create all kinds of radio goofiness. Often happening in a summer afternoon or evening and lasting up to a few hours, they can result in ducting, funneling local communications much further than normal. While often called “Skip” it was actually a different phenomenon. It was most prevalent on VHF High band (150 MHz.), probably since that was the most common band used at the time. It was common for our police/fire dispatch center to hear VHF traffic from hundreds of miles away in northern Michigan or Wisconsin, even far western Illinois or eastern Iowa as well as well into Indiana. Sometimes they used the same PL codes as us.
On the 2M ham channel we had certain repeaters that acted as beacons for us to determine how ducting was happening or from what direction. One of our favorites was a 2M repeater in Toluca, IL, roughly 100 miles SW of us North Shore guys. When this repeater came up, we knew that conditions were good. If you could hit it with a portable, then you knew they were REALLY good.
During a huge inversion in the late 80’s or early 90’s, which lasted several days, I was able to work a repeater in Lima OH, over 200 miles away, on my portable 2M radio. On a couple local repeater channels, one could hear multiple repeaters’ hang-times keying off. I was home with the flu during this inversion and spent hours with a scanner, 2M radio and a PL decoder nabbing PL’s and making QSO’s all over the Midwest.
Ham radio has always been fun; there are so many different facets to it to explore. It just requires some investments of time, money and effort.
I took my ham radio test in the mid 1980’s, along with a group of scanner hobbyists I hung with. Matt, Scott, Greg, Doug and I all went to the same 6-week class, and we all got our licenses thru this class. Matt actually passed his 5WPM code test as well as the Novice written in Week 5 then his Tech written in Week 6 while the rest of us didn’t pass the code until Week 6. Because of this he got his Novice call about the same time we all got our Technician’s; his Tech call came a couple weeks later so his call was newer than ours even though he was licensed before us. Scott and my callsigns were one letter off, Greg and Doug’s were a little newer due to some delayed paperwork.
Matt got his General pretty quickly and eventually made Extra, the rest of us stuck with our Techs for years. Matt had to pass the 13WPM code test to get his General, the rest of us barely squeaked by to pass the 5WPM test. I finally got my General a few years ago. By then the code tests were long gone. I have promised myself that I would get my Extra, I have the books and just have to devote enough time and effort to study for the test. I think that if I stop writing Tales and actually study, I might get thru it.
I have taken the Extra test a couple times just to see how well I would do. The first time (just before Covid) I did pretty well, getting 27 of 50 questions right. 7 more and I would have passed. Not bad considering I never cracked a book on it. The next time was right after Covid restrictions were lifted and I did quite a bit worse. The guy scoring the sheet had to double-check to make sure he had the right answer key it was that bad. That wasn’t entirely my fault, the testing venue was smack in the middle of the hamfest with lots of noise and distractions. In addition, the test questions were printed poorly, and the margins were messed up, cutting off some of the ends of the questions. At least they did not charge for the tests.
I have Uncle Gordy’s book in my bathroom for daily reading. I also have the HRO and DXE catalogs there, those are much more fun to read during my special time, so I don’t spend to much time trying to memorize questions and answers. I am pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADD, every time I do start going thru the Extra Exam book, I get distracted and start looking up something in the catalogs.
So, let’s go back to the mid 1980’s in north suburban Chicagoland. The five of us newly minted ham radio licensees started off using the repeaters from the club that sponsored our class and testing. The day my license showed up in the mail I excitedly called Matt or Greg on the repeater, and we spoke for a few minutes. Now, most of us were cops (me) dispatchers (Matt and Greg), reporters (Doug) former firefighters (Scott and I) or former dispatchers (again Scott, and I). We all were much more familiar with “police style” phonetics (A-Adam, B-Boy, C-Charles etc.) and not the ham-style (A-Alpha, B-Bravo, C-Charlie etc.). When we gave our shiny, brand new call signs. I was “Nora 9 John Ida George”, not “November Niner Juliet India Golf”.
The president of the club broke into our QSO on the repeater and yelled at us for “using the ‘wrong’ phonetics”. Well, this went over with us like a lead balloon. We would have been fine if he contacted us privately and asked us to use the preferred phonetics while on the repeater but the way he did so publicly was dead wrong. We all resigned our club memberships on the spot. I did so verbally to him on the repeater in a spiteful tit-for-tat. I probably shouldn’t have done so but he really torqued me off!
Some of us joined other local ham clubs afterwards. I joined a couple mostly for the Autopatch access. Remember back in the 80’s cell phones were pretty much restricted to the uber-rich and drug dealers so being able to make phone calls from the car was a huge deal. I had to remind my girlfriends repeatedly to be careful what they say and how they say it when I called “on the Patch”. One girlfriend just didn’t seem to get it; I finally had to stop using “the Patch” to call her and find a payphone.
Pretty soon we decided repeater life wasn’t for us and started using 146.520 simplex instead. While this is pretty much dead these days, in the 80’s it was still pretty busy, especially in the Chicago area. We decided to find a nice quiet simplex frequency we could camp out on and not bother anyone else. We eventually settled on 145.770. This was at the time allocated for experimental and simplex voice. I set up a VOX recorder on it at work (connected to a VHF antenna at about 100 feet up a monopole) and heard no traffic on it for over a month.
Around 1990 or 1991 most of us in the North Shore area started buying Kenwood TM-731A dual-banders. These were great for our purposes, a simple mod allowed for cross-band repeat and we all had the PL Decoders as well. We started using these at our homes as well as in the cars. Each of us had a pair of UHF frequencies (like 446.6625 etc.) that we would use as “Link” frequencies, all with a common PL tone. We each had a “link” frequency for our mobile radios (445.xxxx) and home (446.xxxx). There were no repeaters in the 440 or 441 ranges, they all were from 442 thru 444.975 in the area at the time. We all knew the other guys’ “Link” frequencies so if I was close to Greg’s house I could access his Link to get base-station performance from my HT or mobile. It was a great system, and we used it for years without issues.
Years later one of us got a letter in the mail from some hams in the south suburbs who told us we would have to move our simplex operations off of 145.770. It seems that the new “South Suburban Digital Radio Group” (or whatever they called themselves, I really don’t remember) had declared that they were now the coordinating body for ham radio digital operations in northern Illinois and had allocated 145.770 to packet radio. Packet had been getting more and more popular at the time, and they needed spectrum.
I called a friend who was the Illinois Repeater Association frequency coordinator at the time and asked him about these guys. He had never heard of them, nor did anyone else. They were apparently self-appointed and had no recognition by any real coordinating body. I then fired off a letter from the newly formed “Simplex Users Group” and advised them that 145.770 has been allocated for Simplex Voice use only in northern Illinois. When they replied I told them that we did not want to get into a war with them, but we had been operating on 145.770 for almost a decade and would continue to do so. If they wished to share the channel with us, they should be sure we were not operating on it before they commenced operations to avoid interference. We would do the same. This was not acceptable to them, so we told them to take it up with the ARRL and the real frequency coordinators. That was the last we heard from them; I found out later that they found a different frequency to use for their packet operations.
The only other users we ever heard on 145.770 back in the day were a small group of old guys in the west suburbs that had a regular sched in the mornings. From listening to them they were aware of us, but they were close enough to each other where we could do our thing at the same time and they could hear each other over our operations. We did chat with them a few times when we were in their area and we co-existed peacefully for years.
As several of us were also involved with the Chicago Area Radio Monitoring Association (CARMA) at the time CARMA adopted 145.770 as its ham simplex frequency as well. Many CARMA members who were hams used this at events or for general chit-chat over the years. When I moved from the area 10 years ago it was still being used.
Now that I live here in Arizona, we have been using 145.770 in my neighborhood for a group of hams on our weekly sched.
So, once again, back to our group of hams in the 80’s and 90’s. When one of us bought a new type of radio and liked it one or more of the others would usually get one as well. Matt and I often did so. I got a FTC1143, then he did. He got a TM-731A, then so did Greg, Doug and I did.
While the Kenwood TM-731A was our mobile and base radio of choice most of us also had various other radios. I had a couple different Icom mobiles, like the IC-2800. My 2800 was purchased from a friend who had it in his car for several years. He was a heavy smoker and always had an RC Cola or Dr. Pepper in hand. In the car he seemed to spill as much as he drank, and his car was filthy as one would expect. The radio installed in his car was no exception. He sold it to me for $40, a real steal. Sure, it was encrusted with dried up soda pop, cigarette ashes and solidified smoke but it worked, and the radio itself was fine. I figured I could replace the control head and microphone and still come out ahead in the deal.
I decided to try to salvage the control head and mic first. I took them all apart and separated the plastic bits from the rest. Then I went to the local Walgreens and bought a big box of denture tablets. I then put a dozen or so in hot water and soaked the plastic bits overnight. I did the same for the glass cover of the LCD display. I then took cleaned the mic cable as best I could. When I was done the control head and mic looked almost brand new. For an investment of $40 and another $5 worth of Efferdent I had a great radio that looked brand new. I saw the guy I bought it from a few months later and he couldn’t believe it was the same radio.
Around the same time many of us were also getting into GMRS. One popular radio that many of us had was the Icom U16 and H16. These were 16-channel programmable radios. The U16 (UHF) would program down to 440 MHz. and as far as 480 MHz. This allowed us to use them on our GMRS and ham repeaters and monitor our local police channels on 470 MHz. The H16 worked on the 2-Meter ham band as well as allowing us to listen to the local VHF police and fire channels as well as the marine channels as we all lived near Lake Michigan.
Another popular radio for us at the time was the FTC-1123 and FTC-1143 portables from Yaesu. These were 10 channel VHF or UHF portables that normally would be set up for 150-160 MHz. (1123 model) or 460-470 MHz. (1143). One could however flip them to 140-150 or 440-450 with a keyboard command. While this would erase all the memories, they were easy to program from the keyboard. They were nice and compact, and we used them for both ham and GMRS, just not at the same time. Matt still has his and he fired it up a few months ago for grins and giggles and it still works great. The Yaesu’s had analog S-Meters on them, and they worked great even if they were small.
The Yaesu FT-470 however was our real ham radio portable workhorse at the time. This neat little portable was cheaper than the Icoms and worked just as well. Most of us had these. There were a wide variety of other radios in use by us back then, including other Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood and other brands as well as adding our channels to our Motorola radios when we could.
None of us really got into HF work back then. I dabbled in some 10M stuff once they opened that up to Techs and Matt did some HF work as he had his General but for the most part it was 2M, 440 and GMRS for us. I had a couple different 220 radios now and then but never really caught that bug.
When I started to handle the radio maintenance at work I programmed our 145.770 simplex frequency into the mobile radios in the squad cars, labeled as “Unused”. There was one other ham on our small department and one of our dispatchers (Ted) was also a ham and we all knew what that channel was. I also put it in the backup radio in the Comm Center, again so our dispatch and I could use it when it was slow. Eventually I even programmed it in the VHF Quantar base station and created a hidden button on the dispatch console that only Ted and I knew about. That worked really well!
While I left GMRS for the most part after a while I stuck with ham radio. Up until the time I moved out of state I used 145.770 all the time. It was always the selected channel in my dual bander. Now that we have our little group here in Arizona, I still have it in several radios and if not selected in one of my ham rigs at home (like my IC-7100, AT-D578UV or IC-705) I keep a watch on it in one of the scanners.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s one could take a trip anywhere in the Midwest and find activity on 146.520 or 446.000 at almost any time in almost any location. Driving to Hamvention in Dayton one would hear it active non-stop. Occasionally we would do the Midwest version of Mountain Topping by going to the observation area atop the Sears Tower or Hancock building in Chicago with an HT and see how far we could make it on 4 watts. Contacts into Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan were common on simplex. A couple of us liked to go to a place near Lake Geneva WI, where we found a local high point that allowed us to communicate back to the Chicago area.
Another fun thing was temperature inversions, where a layer of warm air gets stuck over a layer of colder air. These create all kinds of radio goofiness. Often happening in a summer afternoon or evening and lasting up to a few hours, they can result in ducting, funneling local communications much further than normal. While often called “Skip” it was actually a different phenomenon. It was most prevalent on VHF High band (150 MHz.), probably since that was the most common band used at the time. It was common for our police/fire dispatch center to hear VHF traffic from hundreds of miles away in northern Michigan or Wisconsin, even far western Illinois or eastern Iowa as well as well into Indiana. Sometimes they used the same PL codes as us.
On the 2M ham channel we had certain repeaters that acted as beacons for us to determine how ducting was happening or from what direction. One of our favorites was a 2M repeater in Toluca, IL, roughly 100 miles SW of us North Shore guys. When this repeater came up, we knew that conditions were good. If you could hit it with a portable, then you knew they were REALLY good.
During a huge inversion in the late 80’s or early 90’s, which lasted several days, I was able to work a repeater in Lima OH, over 200 miles away, on my portable 2M radio. On a couple local repeater channels, one could hear multiple repeaters’ hang-times keying off. I was home with the flu during this inversion and spent hours with a scanner, 2M radio and a PL decoder nabbing PL’s and making QSO’s all over the Midwest.
Ham radio has always been fun; there are so many different facets to it to explore. It just requires some investments of time, money and effort.
