[BC] Re: The demented pirate (WAS:sign off procedures.)

Tue Feb 21 17:56:57 CST 2006

Willie:

What  jackass he was. I think my friend Joe, I forget his name who did
PT Eng'. work at WICC/WEE told me about this too.

*waits for those mp3s*

PW

On 2/21/06, WFIFeng at aol.com <WFIFeng at aol.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 02/21/2006 4:09:25 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> SBailey at nespower.com writes:
>
> > Wow...I'd love to hear them!
>
> Well, I hope I can find it. It was on a cart. I'll have to see if it wasn't
> discarded a number of years ago, when the "white tornado" swooshed through,
> after we had our automation system up & running.
>
> > Why in the world would a pirate fire up on
> >  1500 after your sign off. Did he have some beef against your station?
> >  That makes no sense to me!
>
> It only made sense to the guy who did it. To say that he had a "beef" with
> the station would be an understatement. He was obsessed with being a "radio
> terrorist". His insanity dates back to years before this, when he would so
> seriously tick-off the local CB'ers, that they did things like pour buckets
> of urine
> into his car, slice his coax into little 1" pieces, filling his mailbox with
> them, and finally culminated by them throwing a dead dog through his living
> room window. I think that was when his wife said "Enough!" because my
> understanding of the CB story is that after that, he stopped.
>
> Then he targetted us.
>
> We found out about it when a listener called us to tell us that there was
> "some guy getting on the air after we signed-off, saying all kinds of wierd
> stuff." The following day, I set up a radio to listen to our frequency, and
> sure
> enough, there he was.
>
> The day after that, I created that special sign-off cart. We never got
> another listener call after that... but he persisted, anyway. Numerous
> reports were
> filed with the FCC, and I understand that twice, they sent an Agent here but
> the guy was not on the air either of those two times.
>
> He was *very* sporadic, sometimes he'd run two days in a row, then *weeks*
> of
> nothing. Then he'd be on, then nothing for a month or two. Then he'd be on 2
> or 3 times in a week, then nothing for several more weeks. This went on,
> literally, for *years*, playing cat-and-mouse. Only the content of his
> "blabcasts"
> changed, once we got to Court. (More on this, later.)
>
> Within the first year, we got a visit from the engineer at WICC (Ed Butler,
> who remains a friend to this day) asking us if we knew we had a pirate
> operating on our frequency. "Do we ever!" was my reply. Well, he asked if I
> would like
> to know where he lived, and I just about jumped out of my socks! "Yes!" (I
> had been trying to triangulate him for *months*, by this time. (Many of his
> transmissions were only a minute or two in duration.) So, he showed me the
> guy's
> house. It was only about 1/4 mile, line-of-sight from us.
>
> After Ed was kind enough to point out his location to us, I didn't have to
> park in different parts of Milford every day after sign-off, FIM at the
> ready,
> waiting to try and get a fix on him. (I did that routine from the time the
> Baseball strike & Berlin wall fell, until the following spring.)
>
> Turns out that I was getting close, actually, but it would probably have
> taken a few more months of his sporadic transmissions before I'd have found
> him.
> Ed found him because he had left his transmitter on for about two hours,
> long
> after dark. Ed had decided to just "scan the band" and where he expected to
> hear WTOP, he heard a loud heterodyne and the "Delilah" show, instead! He
> also
> heard the liners, spots, and so forth from WICC's sister FM station, WEBE,
> and
> determined that it was a show which had aired some weeks before. He went
> home,
> got his FIM, and did a little "recreational RDF'ing" that night. Since the
> guy
> had left his transmitter on all that time, it didn't take Ed too long to
> zero-in on it. I certainly am grateful to him for this, among other things!
> :)
>
> I'll never forget the July evening when I left Church, and started the
> car...
> only to hear my radio with his voice coming out of it, calling me
> denigrating
> names! I high-tailed it to the station, and dumped the carrier on top of
> him!
> (At that time, we were signing-off at 8pm, but we could have been on until
> 8:45. Since I had several more minutes to go, I jammed him for as long as I
> could, gave an ID, and that was it.)
>
> He also decided to try his hand at it in the morning, before sign-on. Well,
> I
> was ready for him. I always kept a radio on so I would know if he was
> there... and sure enough, one morning, he fired it up. I grabed a portable
> radio, ran
> upstairs to the TX room, and hit the Plates. 5Kw of white noise, right on
> top
> of him. He barely got two words out. I left it run a few minutes, then
> dropped it. (This was before 6am, during the "Experimental Period".) Nothing
> but
> WTOP. A minute or so later, there was his carrier. I waited. The instant I
> heard
> audio, "Click!" and 5Kw of white noise greeted him. We played that cat&mouse
> game about 3 times, until he gave up. After a few minutes, I just put the
> dead
> carrier on, and went downstairs and gave the Legal. The carrier remained on
> for about 5 more mintes, until the 6am sign-on cart.
>
> The following morning, lather, rinse, repeat. That was the very last time he
> ever tried the morning, though. He knew by then that it would be fruitless.
> He
> was no match for 5Kw, and my tenacity. ;)
>
> Anyway, after a whole bunch of his kind of on-air hoopla, we finally had our
> day in Court. I came in with a voluminous amount of recordings. I think he
> must have been startled at the amount. I had carefully chosen the most
> damning
> recordings of the stack, to be played first. One was a recording of him
> testing... in it, he called-out his sister's name several times.
> She responed (way-off-mic) by saying, "What (name)?!?"
> He said, "Can you hear me?"
> She said "I don't WANNA hear you!"
>
> There were many others, but that was the best, since we had documented the
> fact that he does have a sister by that name, and you could hear her call
> out
> his name as well.
>
> Well, after that first day in Court, all the time vehemently denying that it
> was him, his on-air routine *completely* changed! Never again did we hear
> his
> voice. From that time until the trial was done, and the Judge's Order
> actually
> carried-out, all he did was play excerpts of Howard, and part of the 'Stones
> song, "Start me up!" where it says, "Start me up! I never stop! I never
> stop!"
> over and over. Still, we kept recording. One evening I was able to get 5 or
> 6
> directional readings, all converging on his house, all the while a friend
> sat
> in my car, watching. (He was a witness at the trial.) We presented that in
> Court as well.
>
> It was a nightmare, let me tell you! At least it finally ended sometime in
> 1994. A couple years later, he begged to have us drop the lien we held
> against
> his house, and actually apologized for all the trouble he caused! (This
> after
> years of vehement denials.) The best part is that all of it had finally
> stopped, and has never returned.
>
> There's more, but it's just tedious and somewhat redundant. This is the
> "Reader's Digest" version. ;)
>
> Willie...
>
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