The Place: The outskirts of Norristown Pa.

The Time: Jan 1976

The Channel: 10

Recorded With: A cassette recorder from a Courier Caravelle

The Characters:

Mitch (242): The first guy on the tape. Very over modulated, because his mike is wide open. 

Rose: Asks, "What in the hell is going on?" 

Dave: Shows off his technical prowess, as he slides off frequency to imitate the squatters. 

Pete: Person recording this tape. Asks Mitch "How’s my Mod?"

Kitchen Maid: Asks about "FCC" vans, in town.

Uncle Albert: High pitched voiced kid, who offers up his thoughts on where the carriers are originating from.

And a few comments from some of the "Squatters", are also heard in between the ruckus.

Background: The truckers had recently vacated channel 10, to move up to 19.  Our local group had then moved from an increasingly more crowded channel (11), to the now mostly open channel 10.  We adopted channel 10 as our new home, and as many groups were guilty of back then, we were somewhat territorial about it.  Newcomers were welcome, but we didn’t tolerate other groups trying to set up shop right over top of us, which is what the case was in this little excerpt.  The signature element of this group of "squatters", was the old tube rig that the main guy ran, which was suffering from a bad case of crystal drift and generally weak modulation.  A fact which we capitalized on during this (and subsequent) exchange(s).

The rigs heard here were SBE Trinidad (Mitch and Rose), a Lafayette Comstat 25 (Dave), a Regency Base, (Kitchen Maid), a Midland 13-862b (Uncle Albert), and a Courier Caravelle (Pete). We all had D-104 Mic’s except for Uncle Albert, who ran a Turner mobile +2.

No Squatters   5:49 minutes, mp3 format