Dealing with your local troublemaker

We’ve all run into that donkey’s ass.

You know the guy – the one who throws the 10 hour musical carrier of his Diana Ross collection. The guy that swears at everyone and sounds like a tourettes case. The guy that wants to fight everyone for some reason but never shows up to do it. The guy that needs to play with his echo for hours on end. The guy that plays the annoying sound bits over and over and over.

Yes we all know the troublemakers well.

Now I don’t mind horseplay on the radio – for most of us it is just an entertaining piece of equipment and swearing and telling jokes and everything goes along with the territory. We all like keying on someone every once in a while just to let everyone know who has the loudest station in town. All of those things to me are part of radio.

But there are people that cross that invisible line in the airwaves and how do you deal with them?

Well I have two sets of solutions (nice guy solutions) and (bad guy solutions).

These are all merely things that other people have suggested over the years, many of these are illegal or even highly illegal and I don’t suggest that anyone should do any of them as it could result in fines or jail time or even result in getting your ass kicked.  Everything below is just for humor 🙂

Solution #1

Turn off the radio.

It’s really the easiest thing to do, but for some reason millions of people out there don’t have the will to just turn off the stupid thing when it gets annoying.

Troublemakers are like bullies. They only keep doing their thing when they have people to do it to. When there isn’t anyone around they get bored and move on. Most troublemakers suffer from some sort of social problem and they just can’t get along with other people no matter what people do to try. So don’t waste your time arguing or trying to rationalize with them. Just turn off the radio.

Don’t worry – you really won’t miss anything important.

Solution #2

Following in the footsteps of solution # 1 is the easy step of just changing the channel. There are plenty of people out there to talk to and although everyone has a favorite channel, why not mix it up and go talk to someone new on another channel?

Solution #3

Try talking to the loser – the troublemaker obviously is looking for attention or has some personal issues, but often just asking a person nicely to back off and observe some radio courtesy can do the trick.

You’d be surprised what a little on-air courtesy can do. The other day there were two guys having a conversation on 38 LSB when some people on AM started causing some bleedover. The people on LSB just jumped over to AM and started yelling at them and the channel was a mess for the next half hour.

A day later the same thing was happening and I went over and kindly asked them if they would change to another channel and they happily complied.

Solution #4

The deadkey. Although the troublemaker does it to you, you can just as easily do it to them. Especially if your station is louder. Nothing hurts a troublemaker more than knowing that they are getting shut out and walked on.

To do this effectively you’ll need a very good setup with a good antenna. Now throwing a deadkey isn’t the best thing for your radio because it creates heat and wear and tear on the transceiver. I’d suggest using a back up radio or old radio that you don’t really care about, that way you don’t fry your brand new radio.

Solution #5

So you try throwing a deadkey but your station doesn’t have the power to shut out the troublemaker – now you can switch over to a musical carrier or similar if you like. The downside of broadcasting annoying music to mess with a troublemaker is that you probably will piss off just as many people as he is.

Although if the troublemaker likes Rap music or something it’s always a little fun to broadcast your favorite country music and imagine the punk having to turn down his volume in disgust.

Solution #6

So your musical carrier and deadkey didn’t make a dent in the armor of the local ass. Now it’s time to get technical and take your hobby to the next level.

Build your own miniature jammer system. This is best done with a fully charged older car battery, small radio such as a Uniden Pro 510 or Cobra 19 (or any other small cheap ass radio) and a simple fiberglass antenna (2′).

You set up this little transmitting bundle someplace very well hidden (maybe in some woods) within a block of the offending CB’er and then turn on the radio and tape down the microphone key with some electrical tape (wrap it around the mike good).

Now you will be giving the troublemaker a 30db deadkey.

The downside of this is that the battery may only last a day or two – some have lasted longer – and it only will stop him from hearing anything on one channel. But at least you can go home and talk on that channel 🙂

This one is more of an amusing thing to do than anything. Don’t forget to go pick up your jammer later and don’t try this one if it’s raining.

Solution #7

Often troublemakers are big talkers but aren’t tough guys in real life. A couple of times I’ve heard of situations getting to the point where the locals decided to give a troublemaker a scare. They tracked down his signal until they found his house and antenna and parked nearby and keyed up and welcomed him to come out and “play”.

Now it could be fun to scare someone a bit – but these days you don’t know if the guy really is a 6’4 psycho or has a gun or whatever so I’d never suggest actually doing this.

So these are just a few of the ways to deal with some A-hole and some could actually be implemented while others might be a bit on the wild side. The one thing I always tell people is don’t go calling the FCC and complaining about a troublemaker.  No one likes a tattletale.