2-3 HAMs with directional 2m/70cm (if it's UHF/VHF repeater - in most of the cases it is) antennas, with some distance from each other, compass + map , that's how in Poland we managed to help our local regulator to figure out where the trolls are, just config your radio to repeater input frequency + attenuators to get more precise reading (s-meter on HT helps)
This also happens here in The Netherlands. A troll has been trolling for more then a year on a repeater in The Hague and the telecom authoritiy does nothing about it, but the make the hams pay their contribution every year anyway. I'm not a ham myself, but I like to listen to the conversations on that server.
We had troubles on several amateur radio and GMRS repeaters in our area. Several of us filed reports with the FCC. They were great to work with in resolving the problems. The big thing to remember is they have a limited staff. The more you can help them the faster they can help you. Recordings, dates, times, frequencies and better yet any direction finding results you have greatly speed up the process. The key is document everything. Remember they have to personally witness the "law" being broken and have to document everything in great detail in case a citation/fine is contested in court. When they "came into our area" they cleaned house. There already there so they are going to monitor basically everything. During the process they left remote receivers in our area that they could remotely access. The outcome was the Enforcement Bureau issued one citation (widely published on TH-cam) and made numerous door knocks in addition to all linked GMRS repeaters being unlinked (linking GMRS repeaters is not allowed). The outcome was the repeaters are now quiet with the exception of their proper intended use and a good working relation with the FCC.
HAHAHA back in the CB Days. We had a lightning bolt take care of one loud mouth dude who thought he owned the whole area. His coax had be pinned then he moved it out of reach. 2 story house with a 4 sided Roof with a Chimney in the Center. Big omni Antenna with Guys down to the Corners. I was at a business kiddy Corner of the intersection from His place counting juke Box money while a Storm was brewing outside. KAABOOM... A bolt of Lightning Hit the Antenna, followed the Guy wire down to a Corner and Blew the top corner of the House apart. Elliot Ness was off the Air....
Decades back there was a well-known lid on 75 meters. In 73 they once had an article where someone said they went to a hamfest and had a badge made with the lids callsign and name made. He put the badge on and walked around just to see the reactions of people. A friend told me another old story from decades back. There was a CBer who liked to cuss at truckers. One day one of the truckers disconnected his trailer and started ramming the CBers house, trying to knock it off the foundation with his truck.
In the San Antonio area several years ago there was one repeater that attracted more than one Lid/troll no matter how much the owners contacted the FCC nothing happened. One of the trolls died and that fixed the part of the issue the other eventually did get dealt with in the legal sphere but it all took over three years as I recall. It took along time for that repeater community to recover.
The swatting thing is attempted murder in my opinion. People have died because of it before. Cops just know the call was put in, not that it was bogus. Confusion and guns are not a good mix.
This has happened a few times on the East Coast Reflector in the middle of a net. I guess some people lead such lame lives that they have to make a nuisance of themselves to feel like they mean something.
What gets me every time I see a story like this, is, they all think that they can't be tracked. When you me and everyone else knows you can. With the introction of multi antenna SDR receivers, Kracken SDR comes to mind,it makes them that much easier to track. I posted a video last week of a net that was 7200. This was planned and Riley Hollingsworth from the FCC was supposed to be on. I applaud there actions. They we're doing this general check in net to purposely drive these lids off 7200. And as I stated in the video I think that this was a lot more than a net. Good video 73 👍🙂
A short time after a Hamfest in my area a few guys started talking on a repeater. They were saying things like 'ok, cool, now if we can keep this frequency we can use it.' They started talking just random things. Hams would key in and tell them you are talking illegally. We had to explain to them that the reason you can talk all over the city is because you are on a repeater. They had a good one, on a 450 ft tower. That is something they did not understand what it was. They eventually stopped. They did not even realize they were on a repeater. MENTAL NOTE.... If you are selling equipment, MIND WIPE IT before the sale. P.S. Around here there is more noise from computer voices telling me they are linking to a node or a connection has failed.
As an outsider looking in, a lot of the responses to the troll are worse than what the troll did. The troll was being annoying, and several hams thought it was a good idea to show up at his house with a mob and threaten him with assault? Hams look like the bad guys here...
The So Cal " infamous" repeater is were all our broken toys cuss at each other all day n all night....Local polte hams NEVER go there, they just leave the Nasties alone to de base each other
I was first licenced in 1994 and was not particularly active on the air. I listened a lot and did not jump in often, as I am not exactly social in person and this carries over to other things too. (Except for social media where I am a self proclaimed meme lord and over sharer.) Weeks later, in the wee hours of the morning I kept being awakened by someone kerchunking the 146.94 repeater in Sedgwick County, KS at 2-4 am. I didn't want to get up and walk to the other room to turn the radio off. Eventually, I decided to go driving do a little driving and hunting. This became a nightly thing. Ultimately I learned who he was from the background noise that was slightly audible as he would briefly deadkey matching when he was actually talking at different times. I had no idea how to properly triangulate and track a signal down - I was much better at autisticly picking out details like background noise and even the barely audible but unique click when he releassed his PTT. Long story short, all this hunting led me to meeting another ham on the air and then a simplex conversion. Turned out he was a disabled guy just blocks from where I was. I went and met him and we've become lifelong friends, brothers really. Unknown to me at the time, he had just gone through some very traumatic events and was struggling to handle them and even questioning his will to live. He later revealed how our meeting and subsequent friendship helped him get through that.
Another option is to send a recording to every elected official in the area saying that this person is giving the community a bad reputation, and send it to the ARRL section staff and ARRL region board member. I like the idea of a restraining order if the person's location is known, and has documented threats.. Another idea is to change the tone on the repeater, on a specified date, after notification of club members, rent a white cargo van, and drive it around town with 4 or 5 mag mount antennas on top. Have a net and everyone say mobile when they check-in.
I am new to Ham Radio. I have not heard any trolls in the repeaters in my area. We have what i think is a good local club, but it is the only club I have been involved in. Clark County Amateur Radio Association W8OG.. Thanks for the interesting video
We had someone in my area just kerchunking all the repeaters whenever someone would get get on them. It got to the point I no longer respond unless I can make out some kind of voice. Supposedly there were multiple offenders and one of the guys who helped with identifying the offenders mentioned on the repeaters that the identities were known and that they were reported to the FCC. The constant kerchunking stopped shortly after.
Keep in mind a 'kerchunk' could be a sign that they have a defective component on their radio, or does not have the correct tone or settings to get on the repeater. sometimes a messge that they are doing an unspeakable act and some way they can get assistance is more helpful.
Few months ago I was with a group assisting with emergency coms for a major city marathon. We were setting up coms and station check-ins and had a troll disrupting our coms and intentionally interfering with our operations. Moron had no clue what we were doing and was acting like we were random people making noise. Not much we could do but ignore him and get the job done. He eventually shut up but the ignorance and attitude made me mad and reinforced the sad/angry hams trope. Sometimes people suck.
We have a large linked repeater network across eastern oklahoma. Someone.. somewhere has learned about the goat scream sound effect. it just randomly fires off, and at times breaks into conversations. I've even heard Beavis say he needs Tp for his bunghole a couple of times. along with this, they will deadkey until the repeaters time out, remember.. linked network across half the state.. it's very disruptive and since they could be jsut about anywhere from kansas to texas, and okc to fort smith... difficult but not impossible to pin down.
As a Retired Police Officer. I guarantee that the Trolls peek at full moon time. I never even had to look at the calendar and I always knew when it was a full moon.
There is a word for those people that go crazy on a full moon, they are called "Lunatics". Funny that the full moon statement is true enough for a word to be created around it.
We have a guy on our 2m area wide repeater that only dorks the repeater with the emergency siren from his Baofeng. Does it daily yet not long enough to hunt or ever know who or where its coming from, especially a HT. They did narrow down the receiver he's hitting but the receiver coverage area is huge. Sadly been going on for months & any Tom Dick & Harry can do it for $20
We have someone that keeps keying up and saying nothing on a repeater until the owner gets on and says something about it. Then it seems to quit until the next evening.
A generator that is not properly suppressed for RFI and EMI will easily jam any radio signals. And you only need to be on the street in front of the offender's home. I had a trucked mounted machine shop while in the Army that had a 25 KW PTO driven generator that was not suppressed, I would jam every radio within a 150 foot radius of my truck when the generator was running.
No worries about this happening in my local area, 99% of the time the only thing you hear on the many repeaters here their ID. Getting on an putting your call out is returned with nothing.
We have an extremely active repeater in our area. We also get our share of unlicensed non hams as well. A lot of the time if we just ignore them, they will go away. It, however, can be a problem with the ones that stick around. I guess the fcc does not want to police our ham bands, if they did monitor then 7.200 would have been shut down a long time ago.
In the 1970's CB was illegal in the UK. We still used them but everything was kept secret. We had one lad who would constantly play music on the channel people was trying to talk on. A CBer called Sandman built a directional antenna and we used it to track him down. When we found him he was sad in his car keying up to his stereo speaker. Just to say his CB rig did not last long under the wheel of Sandmans truck. After this the airways were nice and quiet with no music or screeming being heard again. Becasuse CB was illegal he thought he was unable to report this to the police.
The regulatory philosophy in the UK has long been to encourage amateurs to police themselves as much as possible using mutual cooperation and peer pressure and it works pretty well, and things like illegal CB were mostly tolerated exactly because the GPO didn't have the resources to go tracking people down _unless_ they were causing serious interference to legitimate spectrum users. So applying that standard I'm pretty sure that Sandman was merely helping the CB community to self-police using mutual cooperation and peer pressure. :)
Exactly, trolls only want attention, putting them on TH-cam or local media is just validating their existence, this is no different than a noisy child, ignore them and they eventually get bored and shut up.
Chicken band radio has there share a putnam county Ohio. Club went on the hunt. The tower was pulled down at 02:00 am. And his car rig got clipped. And the sheriff who did supplement them for out of range. just seemed never to procute them 😊😊😊
This stuff is difficult because the airwaves are essentially anonymous. If he is on the air a lot, it might be possible to find him, but if it's random and only a few minutes at a time, it could be difficult to identify him, However, if he's on a lot, they should be able to find him. Once identified, it might be highly effective to publicly out him in every forum in town. Provide recordings and reports of incidents. Few people would continue to troll if everyone in town knew who he was.
The key to starting the process is for EVERYONE to listen on the repeaters input frequency. All you need is one person that can hear them on the input. A quick deployment of a doppler tracking system to that persons location and the end is near for the Lid.
It’s unlikely that he swatted someone and wasn’t arrested or investigated. They are absolutely going back to look for the complainant in that situation.
Depends on your area, maybe. If you live in a State where people are just pissed-off at the world, then sure. But where I live, there are many welcoming Hams and Clubs. So expand your horizons, maybe...
For UHF/VHF Fox them then persuade and/or prevent further issues... If they don't take the wakeup call they can be found I guess it would depend case by case, Solar computer with an LTE modem and a debug wifi/bt module can go a long way... On HF though they could be 5miles away or 5000 so it is far less likely to locate them in a man on ground style... On a side note did you notice that recently "MudDuck's" YT channel was completely removed??
I run a weekly net on the local repeater linked up with echo link and video streamed to Facebook. A few weeks back we had such a troll as a one off. We didn't know who he was but the language, ... damn. I ended up just calling the net off, disconnecting the repeater from echo link and stopping (and later deleting) the video stream to take his audience away. While some may say I let him win, when he lost his audience he stopped. - VK2MG (Australia)
It's amazing that one idiot can create so much chaos. We've got a few of them here but we have found that if you ignore them, they get bored. Of course, if 199 people ignore those folks yet one person buys into it, they jerk ramps things up. We had a guy who made crying baby sounds and another who played racist music. Complaints were filed with the FCC. It's hard to get the FCC to act on this stuff because they're looking for very black and white legal infractions. A lot of the stuff that goes on is primarily annoyances and nuisance based. The guy you described sounds like a real problem and not just the usual nonsense. The Swatting should be enough to end his career. Sadly, there's no sanity test you need to take for amateur radio. Thanks for the video,...73...Hugh...KN6KNB
There is a huge problem here in San Diego. As we border Tijuana, there are several illegal GMRS repeaters on the air with no ID located in Tijuana. This rouge club is using vulgar language about Americans along with threats. The location of the repeaters propagates up the coast of Orange County. This rouge club also transmits on CB, 2 meter, 70cm, with mexican music. The political climate on the border creates this ridiculous atmosphere. I live in Tijuana, and I know where the stations are. I have passed the info on to other people. FYI GMRS frequencies are illegal on repeaters in Mexico.
You might find 'them' on 7.2MHz tbf. 😏 I heard a troll on a repeater in the Portland, OR area. I was only listening on this occasion thankfully. Others were trying to deal with it as best they could. A similar situation to the guy you talked about seemingly - dominating the repeater and disrupting normal, legal amateur use of it by anyone. Sad.
@@HamRadio2 He got an 18,000$ forfeiture notice from the FCC in the end. The Fcc works slow, but when you make enough of a jerk of yourself it will eventually attract their ire.
Most people here just ignore the trolls. We have a couple of larged linked repeater networks and with such a large footprint it brings the trolls out. The guys ignore them and deal with them with remarkable efficiency. If someone is just on there kerchunking a lot of times you can scare them off just by saying "(callsign), monitoring" they hear the word monitoring and think monitoring means something other than just listening hahaespecially if you make it sound official. Oh no someone's monitoring lol
If in TEXAS and you can't get satisfaction from the FCC -- Texas Penal Code - 42.07 - Harassment (Chapter 42 pertains to Disorderly Conduct and 47.02 deals with harassment by telephone or other electronic communications.) Specifically: (a) A person commits an offense if, with intent to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, or embarrass another, the person: (7) sends repeated electronic communications in a manner reasonably likely to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another; So this assumes you can identify the guy, and you don't have a lazy prosecutor who can't be bothered to do his or her job. Every state in the U.S. probably has a similar law. What would make it great is if you had a county official, a law enforcement officer, a fire chief, etc, involved with your club - this might incentivize someone to go the extra mile, like seizing all the guy's equipment (and anything that looks like it might be related) as evidence. Make sure your own ducks are in a row when you start the process. Document, document, and document some more. Record what he says. Don't get anyone else on the recording - like a frustrated Ham talking smack to the guy. Get as many people as you can in on the deal - a lazy prosecutor can blow off an individual, but he isn't going to blow off 20 (or 50) voters. Meanwhile, showing up at the guy's house with 20 people threatening to kick his ass is a pretty stupid idea. If I have to explain it, you won't get it.
There are some good roasts on reddit about sad hams and gatekeeping. I listen to my local repeaters and ares nets and I wish there was a ticker on the FCC call sign lookup site. Calling out is like submitting yourself to multiple background checks simultaneously. On a side note.. Saying that the frequencies are for everyone in an emergency should also entail allowing everyone to participate in Area Nets. Just a thought.
Area nets are usually setup for practice of Emcomm and testing of equipment. Everyone is usually welcome to participate, if you have a license. And anyone can get a license. There's no reason to allow unlicensed folks onto a Net until they practice some personal responsibility and get a callsign
@HamRadio2 There's a saying I've heard a lot in the last few years. "Just because you have the radio doesn't mean you're going to know how to use it." "There's no reason to have unlicensed folks onto a net.." You are making an argument against having a functional understanding of radio because you aren't a card carrying member of the club. I have no interest in building and certifying my own radios. And I have no interest in Pota or Sota or logging contacts or broadcasting my colonoscopy results. But I do want to test the equipment I purchase that is certified and I want to understand how the emergency systems work when I need them. What a mess of a hobby/infrastructure.
So you want all the benefits we have without putting in the time and work to get them. Understood. You just need to find other frequencies, honestly. Ham Radio frequencies are limited to Ham Radio operators. So go find some GMRS or Business band frequencies and use those. All of these options are open to anyone, but you have to take some measure of personal responsibility and educate yourself. Don't expect others to just hand it to you...
@HamRadio2 It's not work it's a hobby and if you think you deserve something get a job. Edit: We've heard how useful a transmitting radio was in the last hurricanes. Scanners were the only help to anyone because no one was in the amateur air with any help. Scanning the P25 system is going to save your life. Not some Ham putting out 100w and transmitting CW. Your entitlement serves no one other than parades, marathons and bike races.
I would just let the other guys in my club we where changing the input tone for a while and let the troll just keep trying to key up. Not sure if it's legal, but I doubt the FCC would put it on their to do list if the tone was only changed for a month, or so.
There are a few jack wagons in the Philadelphia area that have some trolls. They seem to have a grudge against another ham. They have come on to the repeater my soon to be former club users and totally ruined our daily nets many times. When Comcast had a major outage, they had nothing better to do. That net was a nightmare. I've few few recordings from random nights I'd listen to the repeater and record their activities. Others in the club know who some of the people are and the FCC are actively gathering evidence. I was asked not to put up the videos, but as I'm leaving the club, I just might. And that's all I have to say about that.
How about hams finding the frequencies the drones over the east coast are being controlled with and reporting it to local law enforcement. Now that would be useful
Has any radio ham within range of this repeater sent a copy of air log, an audio file, or even a audio video file on what's going off on the repeater to the appropriate authorities for your particular country. The more radio hams what do this? The better trolls can be dealt with legally. That's the best way. God bless! 73 G0HDA
I heard a person at a few years ago interfering with Local Amateur Radio traffic. It Sounded like an immature high schooler using radio equipment he had access to. Always talking over people with a voice like Adam Sandler. After about 6 months the problem went away. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a Group of Amateur radio operators you could call, who could assist with a fox hunt and find people like this? Sort of like those Ghost Hunters or Paranormal investigators on TV. Or the A-Team... 73
In my town we had a VE get on the air, calling someone out for kerchunking a repeater. I will send you a recording of him if he does it again. He said he would whup the kerchunkers ass, called him all sorts of vile names, called his mother a whore, other sllurs, gave his own location and invited the person to come there to get an ass whupping. It has been said that a letter was sent to the VEC council and that got him to stop with this nonsense. I was told there are recordings of his tirades on the air, if I find one I will send it to you. This ham has licensed many hams. He should know better. The FCC rule is very vague about what you can say on the radio. It is not like George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On Television. He also gave his call sign and identified himself in these tirades. He would just lose it and go off on a rant when someone kerchunked a repeater. Unidentified transmission carries a punishment. So does inciting violence, and threatening someone. Wheather if carried out or just a threat. This was reported to me from a 3 state area at hamfests and other public meetings. Not a good look.
This reminds me of a repeater in the bay area on top of Mt Diablo. I'm a new operator and I was trying test my signal across the bay to that repeater. The Admin, or I think its the admin, is usually monitoring and seems friendly. But within about 30 seconds one or two people jump on and start making noise, whistling, playing music, making racial slurs, etc. I've only heard them on that one repeater so far. They seems to leave the rest alone and we have a lot of repeaters in the SF bay area. The admin usually makes a comment about the dogs being out and they have rabies. Sounds like this has been going on for a while now and they are just targeting this one repeater/operator.
I can understand a young child getting their hands on a radio and goofing around but these are adults. I have a gmrs license less than a year old and we had someone doing this on our local repeater. Guess you can't help childish stupidity.
I’ve never had any trouble with any of the hams here as far as behavior goes, except tonight where one frequency, just random DTMF tones being played on 2m for some reason. Don’t know why. People are weird. - KF0QNM
I just got my license but I'm really disheartened by the people on the local repeaters. It's non-stop swearing, hate and conspicacies. Why Putin should use nukes against us, how to recognize GMO cabbage, watching the news and doing live hate commentary... There was also a looped automated recording of a long string of profanities that was playing for weeks. You can hear a normal person from time to time but the attitude of the regulars is hardly welcoming. A young guy was trying to join in but they falsely kept telling him that they can hardly hear him and that he should shout into his radio for better modulation. I'll stick with SOTA for now but I think that gradually building a community of normals to outnumber the trolls would be the only solution.
The bottom line is, what good is the FCC if it does not take care of Trolls and Jammers? Jamming is running ramped in Southern CA on 70cm, 2 meters and GMRS. Are tax dollars down the drain.
Why is it that platforming trolls on TH-cam sounds like a bad idea to me (because it would only encourage them), but having a journalist platform them in a small-town weekly rag sounds like a less-bad idea?
@@HamRadio2 Sure, I'll grant that possibility. Teaching middle school has taught me that shaming the shameless is rarely the walk in the park the grown-ups in the room hope it will be. Your mileage may vary.
But in this specific case, ignoring him hasn't worked either. Most of the time, you're correct. Ignore them and they'll go away. But if that doesn't work, further steps need to be taken to take back the airwaves from these folks
If you find a troll on the repeater, log the situation. If possible, getting audio file of the situation and send this audio file to the appropriate authorities and a copy of the log copy of your log where you log the situation and get any of the radio hams to log it as well. Do the same and pass this to the appropriate authorities also, never ever try to communicate with a troll 73 G0HDA God bless
What about Ham influencers making a special YT channel where we out these people? Make a channel that is like what Randy of NotaRubicon does to jerk commenters on his YT channel. He pins them to the top to be mocked. Make a Pinned To The Top YT channel with all the big ham influencers and make the trolls famous!
Unlicensed op with new Baofeng mocked us. He's "just talking" on the repeater. Our club needs to lighten up and chill out. He MIGHT get a license ONE DAY, if we were more inviting. I called the FCC. They begged to differ. Have not heard him since. Are we mean?
I was hoping that someone else with better info than what I have would comment on some of the incidents that have happened in the Denver/ Colorado Springs area in the past. Maybe someone will. 73 de n0km
I’ve heard that on a local repeater. The club just ignores him.
2-3 HAMs with directional 2m/70cm (if it's UHF/VHF repeater - in most of the cases it is) antennas, with some distance from each other, compass + map , that's how in Poland we managed to help our local regulator to figure out where the trolls are, just config your radio to repeater input frequency + attenuators to get more precise reading (s-meter on HT helps)
As SDRs and platforms like Kraken get cheaper, (and remotely operated) these guys will get easier and easier to track
This also happens here in The Netherlands. A troll has been trolling for more then a year on a repeater in The Hague and the telecom authoritiy does nothing about it, but the make the hams pay their contribution every year anyway. I'm not a ham myself, but I like to listen to the conversations on that server.
We had troubles on several amateur radio and GMRS repeaters in our area. Several of us filed reports with the FCC. They were great to work with in resolving the problems. The big thing to remember is they have a limited staff. The more you can help them the faster they can help you. Recordings, dates, times, frequencies and better yet any direction finding results you have greatly speed up the process. The key is document everything. Remember they have to personally witness the "law" being broken and have to document everything in great detail in case a citation/fine is contested in court. When they "came into our area" they cleaned house. There already there so they are going to monitor basically everything. During the process they left remote receivers in our area that they could remotely access. The outcome was the Enforcement Bureau issued one citation (widely published on TH-cam) and made numerous door knocks in addition to all linked GMRS repeaters being unlinked (linking GMRS repeaters is not allowed). The outcome was the repeaters are now quiet with the exception of their proper intended use and a good working relation with the FCC.
@@mikesradiorepair thanks for sharing
💩
HAHAHA back in the CB Days. We had a lightning bolt take care of one loud mouth dude who thought he owned the whole area. His coax had be pinned then he moved it out of reach.
2 story house with a 4 sided Roof with a Chimney in the Center. Big omni Antenna with Guys down to the Corners.
I was at a business kiddy Corner of the intersection from His place counting juke Box money while a Storm was brewing outside. KAABOOM... A bolt of Lightning Hit the Antenna, followed the Guy wire down to a Corner and Blew the top corner of the House apart. Elliot Ness was off the Air....
mere existence of this video itself, gives the trolls more attention than should be paid
Ignoring him hasn't worked, in this case
@@HamRadio2 I must agree. Ignoring them doesn't make them quit, they just wait for the first traffic they hear and jump back on.
Decades back there was a well-known lid on 75 meters. In 73 they once had an article where someone said they went to a hamfest and had a badge made with the lids callsign and name made. He put the badge on and walked around just to see the reactions of people.
A friend told me another old story from decades back. There was a CBer who liked to cuss at truckers. One day one of the truckers disconnected his trailer and started ramming the CBers house, trying to knock it off the foundation with his truck.
There are days when you just gotta do what you gotta do.
In the San Antonio area several years ago there was one repeater that attracted more than one Lid/troll no matter how much the owners contacted the FCC nothing happened. One of the trolls died and that fixed the part of the issue the other eventually did get dealt with in the legal sphere but it all took over three years as I recall. It took along time for that repeater community to recover.
My grandma had a small bridge on her land years ago she swore their was trolls living under it.cheers from u k
The swatting thing is attempted murder in my opinion. People have died because of it before. Cops just know the call was put in, not that it was bogus. Confusion and guns are not a good mix.
100%
This has happened a few times on the East Coast Reflector in the middle of a net. I guess some people lead such lame lives that they have to make a nuisance of themselves to feel like they mean something.
The old CB trick, 📌 the coax
What gets me every time I see a story like this, is, they all think that they can't be tracked. When you me and everyone else knows you can. With the introction of multi antenna SDR receivers, Kracken SDR comes to mind,it makes them that much easier to track. I posted a video last week of a net that was 7200. This was planned and Riley Hollingsworth from the FCC was supposed to be on. I applaud there actions. They we're doing this general check in net to purposely drive these lids off 7200. And as I stated in the video I think that this was a lot more than a net. Good video 73 👍🙂
A short time after a Hamfest in my area a few guys started talking on a repeater. They were saying things like 'ok, cool, now if we can keep this frequency we can use it.' They started talking just random things. Hams would key in and tell them you are talking illegally. We had to explain to them that the reason you can talk all over the city is because you are on a repeater. They had a good one, on a 450 ft tower. That is something they did not understand what it was. They eventually stopped. They did not even realize they were on a repeater. MENTAL NOTE.... If you are selling equipment, MIND WIPE IT before the sale. P.S. Around here there is more noise from computer voices telling me they are linking to a node or a connection has failed.
As an outsider looking in, a lot of the responses to the troll are worse than what the troll did. The troll was being annoying, and several hams thought it was a good idea to show up at his house with a mob and threaten him with assault? Hams look like the bad guys here...
The So Cal " infamous" repeater is were all our broken toys cuss at each other all day n all night....Local polte hams NEVER go there, they just leave the Nasties alone to de base each other
I know that repeater, it's our local garbage dump. -- AA6LJ
I was first licenced in 1994 and was not particularly active on the air. I listened a lot and did not jump in often, as I am not exactly social in person and this carries over to other things too. (Except for social media where I am a self proclaimed meme lord and over sharer.) Weeks later, in the wee hours of the morning I kept being awakened by someone kerchunking the 146.94 repeater in Sedgwick County, KS at 2-4 am. I didn't want to get up and walk to the other room to turn the radio off. Eventually, I decided to go driving do a little driving and hunting. This became a nightly thing. Ultimately I learned who he was from the background noise that was slightly audible as he would briefly deadkey matching when he was actually talking at different times. I had no idea how to properly triangulate and track a signal down - I was much better at autisticly picking out details like background noise and even the barely audible but unique click when he releassed his PTT.
Long story short, all this hunting led me to meeting another ham on the air and then a simplex conversion. Turned out he was a disabled guy just blocks from where I was. I went and met him and we've become lifelong friends, brothers really. Unknown to me at the time, he had just gone through some very traumatic events and was struggling to handle them and even questioning his will to live. He later revealed how our meeting and subsequent friendship helped him get through that.
Another option is to send a recording to every elected official in the area saying that this person is giving the community a bad reputation, and send it to the ARRL section staff and ARRL region board member.
I like the idea of a restraining order if the person's location is known, and has documented threats..
Another idea is to change the tone on the repeater, on a specified date, after notification of club members, rent a white cargo van, and drive it around town with 4 or 5 mag mount antennas on top. Have a net and everyone say mobile when they check-in.
I am new to Ham Radio. I have not heard any trolls in the repeaters in my area. We have what i think is a good local club, but it is the only club I have been involved in. Clark County Amateur Radio Association W8OG.. Thanks for the interesting video
Same here, hearing these people in my area is rare
Threatening to kick someone's ass is the definition of assault. But you do you.
It wasn't my idea, but a threat isn't an assault.
We had someone in my area just kerchunking all the repeaters whenever someone would get get on them. It got to the point I no longer respond unless I can make out some kind of voice. Supposedly there were multiple offenders and one of the guys who helped with identifying the offenders mentioned on the repeaters that the identities were known and that they were reported to the FCC. The constant kerchunking stopped shortly after.
Keep in mind a 'kerchunk' could be a sign that they have a defective component on their radio, or does not have the correct tone or settings to get on the repeater. sometimes a messge that they are doing an unspeakable act and some way they can get assistance is more helpful.
Few months ago I was with a group assisting with emergency coms for a major city marathon. We were setting up coms and station check-ins and had a troll disrupting our coms and intentionally interfering with our operations. Moron had no clue what we were doing and was acting like we were random people making noise. Not much we could do but ignore him and get the job done. He eventually shut up but the ignorance and attitude made me mad and reinforced the sad/angry hams trope. Sometimes people suck.
Before stepping on his property to "inspect" the feedline, be damn sure you scope out the house with an IR lens for NV cameras.
We have a large linked repeater network across eastern oklahoma. Someone.. somewhere has learned about the goat scream sound effect. it just randomly fires off, and at times breaks into conversations. I've even heard Beavis say he needs Tp for his bunghole a couple of times. along with this, they will deadkey until the repeaters time out, remember.. linked network across half the state.. it's very disruptive and since they could be jsut about anywhere from kansas to texas, and okc to fort smith... difficult but not impossible to pin down.
Yeah that makes it harder, for sure
I'm just south of Fort Smith, what repeater are you referring too ?
That’s why we can’t have nice things.
As a Retired Police Officer. I guarantee that the Trolls peek at full moon time.
I never even had to look at the calendar and I always knew when it was a full moon.
There is a word for those people that go crazy on a full moon, they are called "Lunatics". Funny that the full moon statement is true enough for a word to be created around it.
"sure is quiet tonight" 😅
My mother, a NICU nurse said the same about babies being born.
We have a guy on our 2m area wide repeater that only dorks the repeater with the emergency siren from his Baofeng. Does it daily yet not long enough to hunt or ever know who or where its coming from, especially a HT. They did narrow down the receiver he's hitting but the receiver coverage area is huge. Sadly been going on for months & any Tom Dick & Harry can do it for $20
We have someone that keeps keying up and saying nothing on a repeater until the owner gets on and says something about it. Then it seems to quit until the next evening.
Weird
That's a pretty common occurrence on both of the local 2m repeaters in the Bowling Green, KY area. It's incredibly irritating.
If the person is doing this on a county or local government repeater, talk to the district attorney.
Particularly if the repeater is used in ecomm.
What is the old story about the pin in the coax? 😂
👍 👍 👍
I heard about c.b. users doing that when I was in grade school before 1990 from some high schoolers.
When u make a threat it's called a terroristic threat and can be arrested for it so be careful on that one
A generator that is not properly suppressed for RFI and EMI will easily jam any radio signals. And you only need to be on the street in front of the offender's home. I had a trucked mounted machine shop while in the Army that had a 25 KW PTO driven generator that was not suppressed, I would jam every radio within a 150 foot radius of my truck when the generator was running.
No worries about this happening in my local area, 99% of the time the only thing you hear on the many repeaters here their ID. Getting on an putting your call out is returned with nothing.
Work with your local Hams to change that
Maybe that troll had a 2nd amendment collection😂
We have an extremely active repeater in our area. We also get our share of unlicensed non hams as well. A lot of the time if we just ignore them, they will go away. It, however, can be a problem with the ones that stick around. I guess the fcc does not want to police our ham bands, if they did monitor then 7.200 would have been shut down a long time ago.
In the 1970's CB was illegal in the UK. We still used them but everything was kept secret. We had one lad who would constantly play music on the channel people was trying to talk on. A CBer called Sandman built a directional antenna and we used it to track him down. When we found him he was sad in his car keying up to his stereo speaker. Just to say his CB rig did not last long under the wheel of Sandmans truck. After this the airways were nice and quiet with no music or screeming being heard again.
Becasuse CB was illegal he thought he was unable to report this to the police.
Great story
The regulatory philosophy in the UK has long been to encourage amateurs to police themselves as much as possible using mutual cooperation and peer pressure and it works pretty well, and things like illegal CB were mostly tolerated exactly because the GPO didn't have the resources to go tracking people down _unless_ they were causing serious interference to legitimate spectrum users. So applying that standard I'm pretty sure that Sandman was merely helping the CB community to self-police using mutual cooperation and peer pressure. :)
plain and simple .ignore em😂😂😂
That's the LONG standing advice from the FCC, ARRL, and ALL the big clubs. Unless it is so egregious that you can get the FCC to come do some work.
Exactly, trolls only want attention, putting them on TH-cam or local media is just validating their existence, this is no different than a noisy child, ignore them and they eventually get bored and shut up.
That’s what I’ve always done. Amazing how it sucks the air out of their need for attention seeking.
Love the graphic art! Did you do that?
Photoshop AI
Chicken band radio has there share a putnam county Ohio. Club went on the hunt. The tower was pulled down at 02:00 am. And his car rig got clipped. And the sheriff who did supplement them for out of range. just seemed never to procute them 😊😊😊
This stuff is difficult because the airwaves are essentially anonymous. If he is on the air a lot, it might be possible to find him, but if it's random and only a few minutes at a time, it could be difficult to identify him, However, if he's on a lot, they should be able to find him. Once identified, it might be highly effective to publicly out him in every forum in town. Provide recordings and reports of incidents. Few people would continue to troll if everyone in town knew who he was.
The key to starting the process is for EVERYONE to listen on the repeaters input frequency. All you need is one person that can hear them on the input. A quick deployment of a doppler tracking system to that persons location and the end is near for the Lid.
Fox hunt with old fashioned Roanoke Doppler.
If you can document that someone SWATs people... that's criminal charges and the local DA can be encouraged or forced to follow up and jail him.
It’s unlikely that he swatted someone and wasn’t arrested or investigated. They are absolutely going back to look for the complainant in that situation.
Myself and several others in my area have Kraken SDR gear and can DF a source signal pretty quickly. Not everyone wants to spend the money, though.
Trolls would enjoy the publicity of a news item.
I don't think most of them would want to be named
Someone lied when they said ham radio is a welcoming community 😆
Depends on your area, maybe. If you live in a State where people are just pissed-off at the world, then sure. But where I live, there are many welcoming Hams and Clubs. So expand your horizons, maybe...
Big problem on GMRS in Las Vegas with this.
I like the newspaper and youtube ideas. Its probably not the safest idea to show up to his house
Great video
Thanks!
I’ll talk to them. We have no traffic on our repeaters.
Great idea
What options do the repeater owner/owners have besides changing the tone?
Mob mentality
For UHF/VHF Fox them then persuade and/or prevent further issues...
If they don't take the wakeup call they can be found I guess it would depend case by case,
Solar computer with an LTE modem and a debug wifi/bt module can go a long way...
On HF though they could be 5miles away or 5000 so it is far less likely to locate them in a man on ground style...
On a side note did you notice that recently "MudDuck's" YT channel was completely removed??
I run a weekly net on the local repeater linked up with echo link and video streamed to Facebook. A few weeks back we had such a troll as a one off. We didn't know who he was but the language, ... damn. I ended up just calling the net off, disconnecting the repeater from echo link and stopping (and later deleting) the video stream to take his audience away. While some may say I let him win, when he lost his audience he stopped.
- VK2MG (Australia)
That's probably what I would have done
Is the use of C4 out of line?
Not in my mind
I've got some great recordings of idiots on some local repeaters stored on my 9700. The funniest ones are on HF though. OMG. 😂😊
It's amazing that one idiot can create so much chaos. We've got a few of them here but we have found that if you ignore them, they get bored. Of course, if 199 people ignore those folks yet one person buys into it, they jerk ramps things up. We had a guy who made crying baby sounds and another who played racist music. Complaints were filed with the FCC. It's hard to get the FCC to act on this stuff because they're looking for very black and white legal infractions. A lot of the stuff that goes on is primarily annoyances and nuisance based. The guy you described sounds like a real problem and not just the usual nonsense. The Swatting should be enough to end his career. Sadly, there's no sanity test you need to take for amateur radio. Thanks for the video,...73...Hugh...KN6KNB
I use D-Star Reflectors and DMR,
There is a huge problem here in San Diego. As we border Tijuana, there are several illegal GMRS repeaters on the air with no ID located in Tijuana. This rouge club is using vulgar language about Americans along with threats. The location of the repeaters propagates up the coast of Orange County. This rouge club also transmits on CB, 2 meter, 70cm, with mexican music. The political climate on the border creates this ridiculous atmosphere. I live in Tijuana, and I know where the stations are. I have passed the info on to other people. FYI GMRS frequencies are illegal on repeaters in Mexico.
The trolls are the only things worth listening to on the ham bands.
You might find 'them' on 7.2MHz tbf. 😏 I heard a troll on a repeater in the Portland, OR area. I was only listening on this occasion thankfully. Others were trying to deal with it as best they could. A similar situation to the guy you talked about seemingly - dominating the repeater and disrupting normal, legal amateur use of it by anyone. Sad.
I want that troll meme!!!
isnt his callsign public information with his address, if it is that serious?
If they have his callsign, yes. Many times these fools don't properly ID.
@@HamRadio2 He got an 18,000$ forfeiture notice from the FCC in the end. The Fcc works slow, but when you make enough of a jerk of yourself it will eventually attract their ire.
Most people here just ignore the trolls. We have a couple of larged linked repeater networks and with such a large footprint it brings the trolls out. The guys ignore them and deal with them with remarkable efficiency. If someone is just on there kerchunking a lot of times you can scare them off just by saying "(callsign), monitoring" they hear the word monitoring and think monitoring means something other than just listening hahaespecially if you make it sound official. Oh no someone's monitoring lol
If in TEXAS and you can't get satisfaction from the FCC -- Texas Penal Code - 42.07 - Harassment (Chapter 42 pertains to Disorderly Conduct and 47.02 deals with harassment by telephone or other electronic communications.) Specifically:
(a) A person commits an offense if, with intent to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, or embarrass another, the person:
(7) sends repeated electronic communications in a manner reasonably likely to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another;
So this assumes you can identify the guy, and you don't have a lazy prosecutor who can't be bothered to do his or her job.
Every state in the U.S. probably has a similar law.
What would make it great is if you had a county official, a law enforcement officer, a fire chief, etc, involved with your club - this might incentivize someone to go the extra mile, like seizing all the guy's equipment (and anything that looks like it might be related) as evidence.
Make sure your own ducks are in a row when you start the process. Document, document, and document some more. Record what he says. Don't get anyone else on the recording - like a frustrated Ham talking smack to the guy. Get as many people as you can in on the deal - a lazy prosecutor can blow off an individual, but he isn't going to blow off 20 (or 50) voters.
Meanwhile, showing up at the guy's house with 20 people threatening to kick his ass is a pretty stupid idea. If I have to explain it, you won't get it.
Thanks for commenting
This guy was in Louisiana. As soon as I heard the Blue dingleberry thing, I knew I had read about him. Pretty sad life.
There are some good roasts on reddit about sad hams and gatekeeping.
I listen to my local repeaters and ares nets and I wish there was a ticker on the FCC call sign lookup site.
Calling out is like submitting yourself to multiple background checks simultaneously.
On a side note.. Saying that the frequencies are for everyone in an emergency should also entail allowing everyone to participate in Area Nets. Just a thought.
Area nets are usually setup for practice of Emcomm and testing of equipment. Everyone is usually welcome to participate, if you have a license. And anyone can get a license. There's no reason to allow unlicensed folks onto a Net until they practice some personal responsibility and get a callsign
@HamRadio2 There's a saying I've heard a lot in the last few years.
"Just because you have the radio doesn't mean you're going to know how to use it."
"There's no reason to have unlicensed folks onto a net.." You are making an argument against having a functional understanding of radio because you aren't a card carrying member of the club.
I have no interest in building and certifying my own radios. And I have no interest in Pota or Sota or logging contacts or broadcasting my colonoscopy results.
But I do want to test the equipment I purchase that is certified and I want to understand how the emergency systems work when I need them.
What a mess of a hobby/infrastructure.
So you want all the benefits we have without putting in the time and work to get them. Understood.
You just need to find other frequencies, honestly. Ham Radio frequencies are limited to Ham Radio operators. So go find some GMRS or Business band frequencies and use those. All of these options are open to anyone, but you have to take some measure of personal responsibility and educate yourself. Don't expect others to just hand it to you...
@HamRadio2 It's not work it's a hobby and if you think you deserve something get a job.
Edit: We've heard how useful a transmitting radio was in the last hurricanes. Scanners were the only help to anyone because no one was in the amateur air with any help. Scanning the P25 system is going to save your life. Not some Ham putting out 100w and transmitting CW.
Your entitlement serves no one other than parades, marathons and bike races.
I think the trolls would actually enjoy the publicity.
I would just let the other guys in my club we where changing the input tone for a while and let the troll just keep trying to key up. Not sure if it's legal, but I doubt the FCC would put it on their to do list if the tone was only changed for a month, or so.
FCC has nothing to do with how you set up your repeater
There are a few jack wagons in the Philadelphia area that have some trolls. They seem to have a grudge against another ham. They have come on to the repeater my soon to be former club users and totally ruined our daily nets many times. When Comcast had a major outage, they had nothing better to do. That net was a nightmare. I've few few recordings from random nights I'd listen to the repeater and record their activities. Others in the club know who some of the people are and the FCC are actively gathering evidence.
I was asked not to put up the videos, but as I'm leaving the club, I just might. And that's all I have to say about that.
I feel your pain about Philly area repeaters.
We called these jokers "turkey" back in the day....cir. 70's. I guess "troll" is the term nowadays...Internet I suppose.
How about hams finding the frequencies the drones over the east coast are being controlled with and reporting it to local law enforcement. Now that would be useful
I've looked at a lot of the pics/videos, and the vast majority were just regular aircraft.
Mass Hysteria is a real thing.
Has any radio ham within range of this repeater sent a copy of air log, an audio file, or even a audio video file on what's going off on the repeater to the appropriate authorities for your particular country. The more radio hams what do this? The better trolls can be dealt with legally. That's the best way. God bless! 73 G0HDA
TH-cam is pretty fast at censoring these days.
Yes
He probably started this behavior on cab.
When someone tells you not to Google something, maybe think twice....
I heard a person at a few years ago interfering with Local Amateur Radio traffic. It Sounded like an immature high schooler using radio equipment he had access to. Always talking over people with a voice like Adam Sandler. After about 6 months the problem went away. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a Group of Amateur radio operators you could call, who could assist with a fox hunt and find people like this? Sort of like those Ghost Hunters or Paranormal investigators on TV. Or the A-Team... 73
In my town we had a VE get on the air, calling someone out for kerchunking a repeater. I will send you a recording of him if he does it again. He said he would whup the kerchunkers ass, called him all sorts of vile names, called his mother a whore, other sllurs, gave his own location and invited the person to come there to get an ass whupping. It has been said that a letter was sent to the VEC council and that got him to stop with this nonsense. I was told there are recordings of his tirades on the air, if I find one I will send it to you. This ham has licensed many hams. He should know better. The FCC rule is very vague about what you can say on the radio. It is not like George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On Television. He also gave his call sign and identified himself in these tirades. He would just lose it and go off on a rant when someone kerchunked a repeater. Unidentified transmission carries a punishment. So does inciting violence, and threatening someone. Wheather if carried out or just a threat. This was reported to me from a 3 state area at hamfests and other public meetings. Not a good look.
This reminds me of a repeater in the bay area on top of Mt Diablo. I'm a new operator and I was trying test my signal across the bay to that repeater. The Admin, or I think its the admin, is usually monitoring and seems friendly. But within about 30 seconds one or two people jump on and start making noise, whistling, playing music, making racial slurs, etc.
I've only heard them on that one repeater so far. They seems to leave the rest alone and we have a lot of repeaters in the SF bay area. The admin usually makes a comment about the dogs being out and they have rabies. Sounds like this has been going on for a while now and they are just targeting this one repeater/operator.
I can understand a young child getting their hands on a radio and goofing around but these are adults. I have a gmrs license less than a year old and we had someone doing this on our local repeater.
Guess you can't help childish stupidity.
I like the kick his ass idea more 🤣
Thanks, Jason. 73 de Bill
really easy IGNORE THEM!!!
this guy was on for years he's a ham that goes on CB channel 38 and spouts bs haven't heard him in several years he's from either Texas or Oklahoma
I’ve never had any trouble with any of the hams here as far as behavior goes, except tonight where one frequency, just random DTMF tones being played on 2m for some reason. Don’t know why.
People are weird.
- KF0QNM
Don't feed the trolls
No, but also don't let them win
If the FCC won't do anything, what do they do??
Wow...HAM problems, lol, well back to skip on lower 38 and listening to the "1111111111111111111111111111" guy!😆
Haha
Maybe bringing a mob to someone’s home isn’t the best advice. Even if he is a complete idiot. Cornered animals can be dangerous.
Go get him
I just got my license but I'm really disheartened by the people on the local repeaters. It's non-stop swearing, hate and conspicacies. Why Putin should use nukes against us, how to recognize GMO cabbage, watching the news and doing live hate commentary... There was also a looped automated recording of a long string of profanities that was playing for weeks. You can hear a normal person from time to time but the attitude of the regulars is hardly welcoming. A young guy was trying to join in but they falsely kept telling him that they can hardly hear him and that he should shout into his radio for better modulation. I'll stick with SOTA for now but I think that gradually building a community of normals to outnumber the trolls would be the only solution.
The bottom line is, what good is the FCC if it does not take care of Trolls and Jammers? Jamming is running ramped in Southern CA on 70cm, 2 meters and GMRS. Are tax dollars down the drain.
I've put the local radio pirate on my YT channel.
Why is it that platforming trolls on TH-cam sounds like a bad idea to me (because it would only encourage them), but having a journalist platform them in a small-town weekly rag sounds like a less-bad idea?
IDK maybe you don't understand the power of TH-cam
@@HamRadio2 Sure, I'll grant that possibility. Teaching middle school has taught me that shaming the shameless is rarely the walk in the park the grown-ups in the room hope it will be. Your mileage may vary.
But in this specific case, ignoring him hasn't worked either. Most of the time, you're correct. Ignore them and they'll go away. But if that doesn't work, further steps need to be taken to take back the airwaves from these folks
More good content from 2.0 …
Thanks
If you find a troll on the repeater, log the situation. If possible, getting audio file of the situation and send this audio file to the appropriate authorities and a copy of the log copy of your log where you log the situation and get any of the radio hams to log it as well. Do the same and pass this to the appropriate authorities also, never ever try to communicate with a troll
73 G0HDA
God bless
What about Ham influencers making a special YT channel where we out these people? Make a channel that is like what Randy of NotaRubicon does to jerk commenters on his YT channel. He pins them to the top to be mocked. Make a Pinned To The Top YT channel with all the big ham influencers and make the trolls famous!
I wanna see that guy SIZZLE!
Another TH-cam channel would also be not a Rubicon cause lots of sad GMRS operators and sad hands hate him lol
Unlicensed op with new Baofeng mocked us. He's "just talking" on the repeater. Our club needs to lighten up and chill out. He MIGHT get a license ONE DAY, if we were more inviting. I called the FCC. They begged to differ. Have not heard him since. Are we mean?
Nope
Repeater trolls are more fun than what normally happens on repeaters
Get out the RDF gear and let the Fox Hunt begin.
I was hoping that someone else with better info than what I have would comment on some of the incidents that have happened in the Denver/ Colorado Springs area in the past. Maybe someone will. 73 de n0km
I troll them back till they regret their life decisions... That's just me though.
Yes