The new Pope and the ignoring of intentional interference on KC4WDI

Nets and conversations on repeaters in the Wake County, NC vicinity are getting trolled by someone. I wasn’t completely sure until last Friday.

“Nuisance jammer” may not be quite the right term—that seems to imply the use of hardware to interfere with or alter signals—but I’m going with jammer because it’s fun to type. This guy has an overdriven signal but is just trying to be annoying and make fun of Republicans.

The jammer pretends to be a MAGA caricature, interrupting conversations to say things like “Hey do yall love Trump as much as I do?” and “It’s a great day for Trump!” I’ve caught this sporadically on different repeaters over the last month. I wasn’t certain at first whether the person was a troublemaker or just excited, or if I even heard what I thought I heard. Because people weren’t acknowledging the jammer at all.

Friday morning, as I scanned the repeater presets on the way to work, I landed on a conversation about the new Pope on 444.1 MHz KC4WDI Raleigh. A strangely detailed conversation about Pope trivia was being interrupted every so often by the jammer: “Are yall gonna sell some Trump hats today?”

The other stations continued talking about the number of languages the Pope spoke and one of them explained the word polyglot and even spelled it out loud.

This went on for a few minutes until I got to the parking deck and turned off the radio. The jammer was never acknowledged or discussed by the other two stations. It was quite something to hear.

As seems to be the norm in this magic-making hobby, a synchronicity almost immediately occurred. Flipping through a thrift store book of QST articles I got to reach the free shipping threshold, I came across the following. I realized then that ignoring the jammer was likely a premeditated tactic.

A transcript of the scanned image from BotNHC follows:

When You’re the Victim of Intentional Interference

The question of why one ham intentionally interferes with another would make a fascinating study topic for psychologists. The answer usually involves anger of some sort-either anger at you personally, or anger at the world in general. Amateur Radio is the ideal medium for those who want to act on their frustrations with little fear of suffering the consequences. A ham who wouldn’t dare insult you to your face has no problem anonymously garbling your transmissions!

This type of ham gains pleasure from his actions only when you acknowledge them. He craves attention and your angry response gives him exactly what he needs. The trick is to do everything possib!e to ignore him. Try to continue your conversation as best you can, working around his interruptions without comment If the interference is so bad that you cannot continue, move to another frequency.

I know it’s difficult to hold your tongue in the face of such rude behavior. By ignoring his antics, however, you’ll rob him of the pleasure he seeks. Eventually, he’ll become bored and move on. That’s the worst punishment you can inflict!-WB8IMY

Having now heard this occur, it seems like solid advice. But I do like the extra twist of diving into papal minutiae. How do we add that to the protocol?

I’m not happy about the amount of pro-Trump rhetoric I hear on the local VHF/UHF repeaters, but this is not a good—or even amusing, really—tactic for fighting fascism. I am hopeful we can get more kinds of voices on the air, having nets built around mutual aid and movements and organizing and neighborhoods. As we do, we need to be mindful that anything that is not the status quo will be noticed immediately. We may ourselves encounter bad actors who seek to impede new and different approaches. We would do well to consider that possibility before we encounter it.