A Transmitter Hunt Goes Wrong

This is the story of a simple Transmitter Hunt, which somehow went horribly wrong.

The time was late 1975 or early 1976 and we were currently running on Channel 10.  It had been only a few months since we had moved our home channel from Channel 11 to Channel 10 after the truckers vacated it to move up to Channel 19.  But the evidence was pretty clear to anyone in the local area, that this was to be our new home channel.  Some of the local adults, who ran on Channel 15 at the time, were a bit disappointed that the additional channel now in-between us, didn't lessen the amount of bleed over all that much.  But when viewed from our limited perspective, things were running pretty smoothly.  An occasional squatter group here and there (like on this audio clip) would show up unannounced to test the waters to see if the channel was "open" and then move on when they discovered that it had already been "taken".  But as we carried on with our daily routine, I guess we didn't realize just how far our signals traveled, as we suddenly started having trouble with a group of people about 7 or 8 miles up the road, in a town called Collegeville.  Since we were all within a mile or two of each other with signals at least +10db over S9, we never really paid much attention to signals less than S5 on the meter and we often ran the squelch at the level, so we weren't aware of any problems.  But that all changed one day when we started getting flack from some unidentified mobiles. Accusations started flying about illegal power use, bleed over onto Channel 9, and other incidents.  In itself, this might have been a workable situation, but they chose to become degrading and condescending about it.  Naturally, we didn't take this lying down, and Mitch and I took the lead in fighting them back, with my newly acquired Contex amplifier  seeing a lot of use during that time.  It was lucky that Radio Shack had a lifetime warranty on tubes back then. This type of agitation was nothing new for us, having had to deal with people from both Channel 3 and Channel 15 in the past. These conflicts actually livened things up a bit, and broke up the monotony of the usual banter.  I would be lying if I said that we didn't actually enjoy a bit of conflict on occasion.  But the daily interference onslaughts, in this case, became tiresome after a while, and we finally started considering what to do to solve the problem for good.  Up until this point, this had been strictly an on-air battle.  Normally, what we did over the radio was kept separate from the things and the people we interacted with in person.  Our two worlds were kept apart deliberately. If the issues on the radio became a bit too hot to handle, we could always turn it off.  But all that was about to change.

One day, my tech school electronics instructor took a sick day and we had a substitute. This substitute, who I had never seen before, kept looking at me with a strange sort of "I-know-you-and-I-know-what-you-did" expression.  Needless to say that sort of creeped me out a bit, so I started watching him.  Sensing at some point, that I was aware of his unusual interest in me,  he took me aside and started giving me the third degree about my CB activities.  I immediately suspected that this was somehow related to our recent problems on the radio.  Naturally, I was a bit shocked at the time and wondered who this guy was and how he knew so much about me, and where my friends lived, simply from listening to radio conversations.  Looking back in retrospect though, it's amazing just how much information we give out unknowingly during normal casual conversations.  I'm sure I had made mention of my tech school class, and people like Uncle Albert were always announcing other people's real names when they got a bug up their rear end.  A simple search in the phone book would be enough to fill in the rest of the details in many cases.  So I guess finding out personal information was no amazing feat.  But someone would've had to have a strong incentive and it would have taken a fair amount of careful and dedicated monitoring, over a period of time, to put all of the pieces together.  But whatever the case, somehow these guys had found out enough information that they knew where at least some of us were.  Consequently, not too long afterward, strong mobile carriers would appear almost nightly in an attempt to disrupt us.  Fortunately, most of our group lived close enough to at least one other person that a single mobile could not disrupt us all at the same time, but it did make the usual casual conversations a little rough.  This was a time before most of us had SSB radios, or a ton of "extra" channels.  But a few of us did have an "escape" thanks our newly found ability to reverse synthesizer crystals which gave us some "private" channels.  We would just say "push the button", and we would be out of band and beyond the reach of the jamming stations.  We then used those channels to plan our strategy, and potential revenge.  Of course, we never considered that these guys could do the same thing and were actively listening to us.  It was clear to us at this point that the only way to beat these guys, and end this situation, was to give them back a taste of their own medicine. Unfortunately, these guys had a big head start in the information recon area and we really needed to find out where these guys were first, before we could give them a king size dose of their own medicine.  And so the plan to track down our adversaries came to be.

We decided that LIM (Tom), (since he had a car and a license) Mitch, and myself would hook up my D.F. loop in Tom's car and go hunting.  We also rigged LIM's car with a switchbox to change between antennas, and we even had a dummy load to switch to for close in signals. We also had a clipboard, a small flashlight and a map.  We were rigged for bear.  Once we got our stuff together,  we made a practice run using our own locals to "calibrate" our setup, so that we would know what signal to expect when we were close to our targets.  After we were satisfied that we could do this, we made plans to go out the next night.  Being careful not to reveal too much over the regular channels,  we instead used the "reverse" channels to talk about our plans (Which may have been our undoing).  That night, the three of us squeezed in the front (actually the only) seat in LIM's 1974 Ford Ranchero (Ford's version of an El Camino), with me sandwiched in the middle between Tom and Mitch. Tom drove,  I operated the radio and checked signals, while Mitch navigated via the map.  Once we had our ducks in a row, we then headed toward Collegeville.  But as we approached the area, it became painfully obvious that the channel was deathly quiet.  It didn't take long for us to suspect that they must have somehow known we were coming, and had vacated to another channel, or elected to stay off the radio altogether.  In our arrogance, we never considered that these guys may very well have been technically advanced and had out of band channels to go to that we didn't have.

After all the work we put in to set up for this night, and not wanting to go home without some sort of prize, we started scanning the 23 channels looking for strong locals who might be part of the group we were looking for (nothing like shooting blind).  Our search soon turned up a group of strong locals on Channel 18 and we then started tracking.  It didn't take us too long to find one guy.  We made a note on the map and then we started looking for another. In the midst of our searching, I had an idea to start dumping a carrier on them as some sort of payback (We weren't even sure these were the same guys who were bothering us), and to keep the channel lively and our targets talking.  As we started getting closer to our next target, I wisely stopped throwing the carriers.  About ten minutes later we were pulling up in front of the next guy's house.  It was then that I made the dumbest move of the night.  As a sort of "Gotcha" gesture, I hit the mike for about 2 seconds, hoping to slam the guy's 'S' meter, and thereby letting him know that he had been had.  But we were not prepared for what happened instead.  The next thing we know, this guy comes tearing out of his house,  jumps in his car, and then proceeds to chase after us.  Tom was suddenly in an "Oh Shit!" kind of mood, and he started cursing rapidly in Italian as we pulled away and high tailed it out of the neighborhood at warp speed. Tom's car was no speed demon, (a smogged down 1974 302 ci. engine put out less than 200 H.P.) but we hoped (no, make that prayed!) that we could still elude our pursuer, since we had a significant head start.  By now, we had found our way back out on a main road (Pa. RT-29 if my memory serves me), traveling west back toward Collegeville at speeds exceeding 70 MPH. Tom was driving like his life depended on it, Mitch was holding on tightly to the door handle, and I was stuck in the middle with little to hold on to but the dashboard.  Not surprisingly, we had lost all interest in what was happening on the CB, although the guy chasing us was in contact with his friends on the radio and we could hear him informing them of his efforts to chase down the carrier thrower, and he wasn't sounding all too happy.  I had a brief impulse to jam this guy's transmissions, but I thought better of it, as he was already mad enough, and I didn't want to make things worse.  As it was, our pursuer was 2 or 3 dozen or so car lengths back and closing and things were not looking all that promising.  But God was watching our backs that night (What's that old saying about fortune favoring the foolish?) when all of a sudden another car backed out of a driveway between us and our pursuer, which forced him to slow down and wait for the road to clear again. The sudden jump in distance between us allowed us to make a quick turn at an intersection, and then quickly ducking behind a gas station and out of our pursuer's sight.  No sooner had we stopped the engine and turned off the lights, than our pursuer went speeding by, fortunately without seeing us, still radioing his progress to his compadres on the CB.  At that point, sensing that the ordeal was over, the three of us let out a collective sigh of relief.  It was only then that Mitch and Tom finally unloaded on me for keying up in front of the guy's house.  I guess I deserved at least that much.  After our collective hearts stopped pounding hard, and having had enough excitement for one night, we called it a night and headed home at a much more sedate speed. We could hear our pursuer still talking about us on the radio while he relentlessly continued to look for us.  We had hoped that he never got close enough to get our license number, and indeed, none of us heard anything further as a result of our harrowing escapade.  Recounting this incident 30+ years later, it seemed like a fun outing, but at the time we were truly scared at one point.  We had no idea what might have happened if that guy had managed to trap us.  With three of us and only one of him, the odds were in our favor, but we didn't want to take a chance that he might have been a gun totin' lunatic.

We made a few other attempts at tracking the guys who harassed us, but they were usually a step or two ahead of us, and we never really caught them when they were all on the channel.  But we did manage to "liven up" their area, with some radio humor and music appreciation courtesy of Steve and Jimmy, who were more than happy to use their "talents" to help our cause.  Eventually, the problem went away on its own.  I guess those guys got tired of wasting the gas to drive down to our area just to harass us (Gas had just made a jump to an unheard of $.60 a gallon then), when it became clear that we weren't moving.  Eventually, by the middle of 1976, our Channel 10 group had pretty much died off and most of the remaining people moved to Channel 6.