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Ah, memories of pirate days.
There were three of us then and we held true to the cause for five
excellent years until cars and girls and workday responsibilities
parted us, each in our own way, from that glorious solitude of
togetherness we knew to be radio communication. Starting on 60
metres in the early days, we moved on to join the few others who
were the very first to explore the wonders of 27Mhz. Long before it
became the CB radio band in Oz, we were there, riding the sunspot
cycle, working each other and stations all over the world on our
converted taxi radios, imported illegals and even a few home brews. Alas, all good things come to
an end. Once "CB radio" was "discovered" by every juvenile car
owner in Australia we knew our time was up. There was no going back
to the old days either, we had all come too far along the road to
adulthood to re-engage with the youthful hermetic
existence we had once enjoyed. I wanted my radio days to go on,
but my mates were busy now with new lives and new
interests. So it was, with a certain sense of loss and a distinct
feeling of surrender, that I found myself one warm spring
morning partaking of the 1968 AOCP examinations at the RMIT rooms in
Swanston st. Melbourne.
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Things were never the
same after that. By then I was seriously involved with the
opposing sex, whose members I had found over my few previous
engagements with them, had neither interest nor time
for the odd and apparently nonsensical pursuit of amateur radio.
Radio and electronics was by then also my profession, and
there is nothing like working eight hours a day at something
to destroy any hobby interest one might have in it. In 1975 I
finally chucked in the towel and didn't renew my station
license. Thirty two years have passed since then. I no longer work
in electronics and I have a new home and a wonderful wife who at
least tolerates my peculiar interests. Yet even now, when I sit down
for a night at my
radio, I sometimes see the knowing smirk on the face of that fifteen
year old sitting there in the glow of
his 807 - who seems to have known all along that one day I would find him
again.
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