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The power of public goodwill

Posted on March 27, 2013 by scott

I fielded an interesting call today from a gentleman we’ll call JB. He called some public service folks about some interference he thought might be from ham radio, and they sent me his number.

JB is 80-ish, and seemed like a pretty cool guy. We had a great talk about his situation, which involved very odd behavior from his “touch lamps” (the ones that turn on and off when you touch them), usually in the dead of night. He thought it might be ham radio or perhaps RF from Local Big Employer (the latter being very possible, he lives right across from the plant). I realized this wasn’t likely, but I talked him through it:

  • It’s very unlikely to be RF from any source. The RF is much higher there during the day than at night, which doesn’t match the data, and it would be causing a lot of problems for his neighbors as well.
  • Those touch devices are, oddly enough, touchy. It doesn’t take much of an electrostatic change to set one off. The cheaper ones are quite sensitive to noise on the power line.
  • Those touch devices are also Part 15 devices, meaning a) they can’t cause interference, and b) there’s no legal recourse if something interferes with them.
  • He’s a block away from a 700-foot tower with Ceiling Cat-knows-what on it…much more likely to be the culprit.
  • We agree the Billboard of Death next to that tower deserves to die, even if it’s not at fault. MAN, that thing is annoying, and noisy on RF.

Short version is that I did not fix his problem, but he went away happy because we at least looked into it. The local ham community takes good operating practice seriously — if it’s us, we fix it. So we do investigate, and we try to help people understand what is going on. In short…we are helpful.

All too often, ham operators (or other volunteers, for that matter) take the “that’s not my job” approach to things. We got into ham radio because…well, we want to do radio stuff! But not every job that needs done involves radios. If you work public service or emergency events, you can be asked to do nearly anything. And you SHOULD, unless that means leaving your primary task uncovered. For example, a ham was asked to assist with setting up a small commissary at an EOC. Why? The comm room only needed one operator at the time, and they could not pull anyone else from their primary tasks…so off he went. The job was done, he got back to the radios, and the operation was not disrupted.

As public service volunteers, we don’t have the luxury of seeming unhelpful. Even just being willing to lend a hand goes a long way toward building trust and good relationships. We’re there to serve, not to be served.

 

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