On Saturday in the NAQP, I spent at least two hours CQing on 14.260 MHz.
A little after 0130 UTC, someone came on frequency and "informed" me that I
was operating on the IOTA frequency, and that I was interfering with one or
two active IOTA DXpeditions who would rather be using this frequency,
and could us contesters be so kind as to keep just this one frequency clear,
seeing as how it is the IOTA frequency after all, and I wasn't on an
island, blah, blah, blah.... He was reasonably polite and all, even gave
a callsign, but of course he was taking like 90+ seconds to make his point,
and I decided that, even though I had really good rate on that band, it was
time to be CQing on 40M anyway, so I left him to argue with himself for who
knows how much longer. Checking 14.260 later on with the second radio, I
never heard anyone else using that frequency, but maybe that was because
signals of adjacent activity that moved in around it made it just as unusable
as if I had been there all along.
Looking up this IOTA business on the web, I find that these people
think they own no fewer than fifteen (15) frequencies on the HF ham bands.
What utter hubris!
I also at one point on Saturday heard some station giving someone on
14.298 MHz grief about how the Maritime Mobile Net had been on 14.300 MHz
for over 40 years, blah, blah, blah - of course, when I tuned up to 14.300
MHz, there's NOBODY there!
Can someone tell me, is there any special interest group in ham radio
today that _doesn't_ think it owns a frequency on 20 meters phone?
--
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker@kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/
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