Yeah, Ham Radio has Some Psychopaths/Sociopaths, Too

Like any other activity or grouping of people bigger than a small room size, there are psychopaths or sociopaths (or both) in ham radio. Unlike some of the groups demanding to be recognized as special, we tend to ignore ours and not give them the attention they're demanding, but I've never heard of anyone trying to track them down and run them out of the hobby or some other sort of punishment. 

It turns out that 10 days ago, last Wednesday evening, July 3rd, I was witness to one. I thought it might be a little interesting for some of you who have never heard of this. 

Let me start by saying I don't know which characterization fits the people who do this: psycho- or socio-. I've come across them in my nearly half century as a ham, and have heard some types of bad behavior thousands of times. The type of behavior I ran across 10 days ago is known by two common names: the most common is "pirate" and I think I've heard the term "slim" used for them. 

The most common time or place to find them is when a group goes to some remote or unoccupied place that's recognized as a ham radio country but essentially has no resident population of hams (or no residents at all!) Someone for reasons I don't have much understanding of pretends that they're the station the big crowd is calling and starts making contacts using their call sign. The person pretending to be the remote station gets no reward; nobody is going to send them money or anything like that. The only thing they get (as I see it) is some satisfaction in ruining someone else's happiness with having made the contact with the rare station; or ruining someone else's enjoyment of the hobby.

Perhaps a real example that happened to me in the last few years might explain it better? A small expedition was made to the Crozet Islands a sub-antarctic group of islands off the SE coast of Africa and a French possession. For various reasons related to radio propagation, my best chance of contacting the station (FT8WW) was in our local evenings on the small 10.1 MHz allocation we have.  One night, after calling the station quite a while, I managed to "work" them. Because they were near a place where they could get internet connectivity, I could check their logs. A couple of days later, the log didn't show my call. I clearly contacted someone else, but who was it? A pirate. Someone who got on the same band at the same times but was only pretending to be who I was trying to contact. 

So I went back to work and contacted them in another day or two, and verified I was in their log.

Doing this is illegal here in the US and could get your licenses suspended (assuming they have a license in the first place). I would be surprised if any country that licensed amateur radio didn't punish this. 

The one that happened July 3rd was a bit more surprising in some ways. On an otherwise quiet evening on the VHF band I'm working on the most lately (6m), a friend here in town worked Alaska.  Like most evenings, my station was on and I was out of the room when it happened. This is a plot like ones I've shown before, of every station my station copied. It's a dramatic example of "one of these things is not like the others." The locations plotted are from what the stations are transmitting. In this computer-mode, the standard calling messages are your call sign and four character grid square.

Now it's not breaking any laws of physics to contact Alaska from Florida, and ISTRC having spoken with guys who have done it. It's just exceptionally unusual. More like once or twice in a lifetime than once a year. Does that prove that the station shown in Alaska wasn't really there? Not at all, I just expect the rest of the plot to be different. That sorta fan-shaped group of contacts on the right very much looks like any old day. For the propagation to be "once in a lifetime", I'd expect those trails to be covering much more of the USA and into more of western Canada. The way this looks is a bit ... funny. A bit suspicious.

I happen to know that this friend and I both have every other state confirmed in the US except Alaska. We just tend to work at it differently. In my early days of ham radio, I learned the lesson to listen much more than you talk. My friend is more inclined to call "CQ Alaska" (calling anyone in Alaska) for long periods while I rarely do that. Actually I don't think I've ever done that.

The day after this (it was evening, local time, right around 8:30 PM EDT, or 0030UTC), the guy from Alaska whose call sign was used (and his grid square used to pinpoint his location on plots like this) said, "sorry not me; I wasn't home when this was reported and I wasn't on." Another pirate.

Finding out who did something like that is probably unrealistic. I can think of ways to do it but they'd all be beyond the budget of a single ham or small-sized club. It would be the exclusive domain of those with "more money than sense." Which is probably why pirates still exist.