OpenCDA

December 14, 2017

Gone Too Far Now!

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 4:03 pm

Nellie the HamAll right!  Now they’ve done it!   They’ve gone one step too far!

It’s one thing for the anti-Trumpers in the FBI and DoJ to allegedly criminally conspire to overthrow the duly-elected President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

That’s bad enough, but now it’s being reported that Nellie Ohr, wife of DoJ official Bruce Ohr who met with Trump Dossier author Christopher Steele, is an amateur radio operator.  Her Technician Class license was granted by the Federal Communications Commission on May 23, 2016.  The radio talk show/internet/skews media rumor mill suggests she and a co-conspirator may have been communicating via ham radio in hopes of avoiding interception by the NSA.  (The flaw in that reasoning is obvious to anyone with a ham ticket.)

Now ol’ Nellie KM4UDZ has really stirred up the hornet’s nest.  If she thinks being pursued by the entire intelligence community plus the US Congress is irritating, just wait until she feels the wrath of the FCC.  Boy, is she ever in trouble now!  Why, they may even revoke her ham radio license!

And being a ham radio operator myself, I’m mad, too.  I just may go stick a pin through her antenna feedline.  That’ll show her!

73’s,

Bill WB7NLR

2 Comments

  1. Naw, she will get a ‘pass’ from the FCC because, as you note, she is just an “amateur.” However, I do like your idea about sticking a pin through her antenna feedline. While I don’t know what type of conduct you are referencing, I am pretty sure that anything involving sticking a pin will not be pleasant for the pinee.

    Comment by Tributary — January 3, 2018 @ 12:47 pm

  2. Tributary,

    Sticking a pin through the coaxial cable feedline shorts the center conductor to the outer (braid) conductor. In older transmitters without impedance mismatch protection that shuts down the power amplifier quickly before damage to the transmitter occurs, the first indication of a problem was often an extremely large amount of smoke, sometimes even sparks, coming out of the transmitter. That was usually followed by an equally fiery string of profanity and gave rise to the term “tune for maximum smoke.”

    An ethical amateur radio operator would never pin another ham’s cable. Usually the pinning was done by a neighbor who believed his ham radio operator neighbor was causing interference with his terrestrial television signal, most often on TV channel 2.

    Since the antenna feedline was sometimes 100′ or longer between its exit from the ham shack and its connection to the antenna, finding the pin to remove it could be very difficult.

    The way to discourage pinning was to demonstrate conclusively to the neighbor that the interference was not being caused by his amateur radio station.

    Usually the neighborly demonstration worked. If it didn’t, the criminal alternative method was to cause your transmitter to generate the interference, then wait and watch for the neighbor to sneak over to pin the feedline. At the moment he was inseerting the pin, you key the transmitter with at least 100 watts of RF output power and listen for the screams of pain accompanied by the neighbor doing an amazingly poor imitation of a rain dance near your antenna. If the neighbor was foolish enough to be on a ladder or better yet, climbing a 40′ tower, to pin the feedline, the results resembled an Olympic high diver who slips just as he leaves the board.

    RF burns are nasty and painful. Higher power outputs (hundreds to thousands of watts) are absolutely lethal. That’s why there are very tall fences around radar sites and terrestrial commercial broadcast antenna towers. Proximity and power burn flesh.

    Comment by Bill — January 3, 2018 @ 1:26 pm

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