banjoplayinnerd (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
banjoplayinnerd) wrote2012-05-20 05:54 pm
banjoplayinnerd) wrote2012-05-20 05:54 pm
Entry tags:
Officer Igor
When you are four years old you come up with imaginative games based on your observation of the world around you. On a recent long car trip Igor the Younger designated my wife as an owl who was supposed to say "Hoo hoo" and my daughter as a rooster who would say "Cock-a-doodle-doo." When the owl hooted he would "go to sleep" (lay his head back and loudly snore) and when the rooster crowed he would jump up and say "Huh? What?"
Igor the Younger has noticed that police officers carry radios much like Grandpa's (a little VHF handheld I use to access the local repeaters) and they wear their microphones on their uniform shirt up near their ears. I call those their epaulets but I don't know if that's the proper word for them.
At any rate he will come in and ask, "Grandpa, can I play Officer Igor?" I, being an accommodating mad scientist, want to facilitate his play time and stir his imagination, so I take my handheld, clip it to his belt, clip the microphone to his collar (because his shirt doesn't have anything that looks like a epaulet) and send him off to serve and protect.
At first I was a bit worried that he would key the microphone and cause me some problems, because unlicensed operators are frowned upon in the ham ranks, even if they're four-year-old policemen. Then I came up with an ingenious plan to keep everyone involved out of trouble. The handheld has a number of non-ham channels programmed into it, including three local National Weather Service channels. I just set the handheld to one of the weather channels and we pretend it's the dispatcher. He's happy, I'm happy, and about the worst that can happen is he runs the battery down. I know how to recharge it.
Ah, but couldn't he change the channel and end up on an unauthorized frequency? There's a two-button combination that locks the keypad so he stays on the weather broadcast, and even if he were to somehow unlock the keypad, the weather broadcast is surrounded by a couple of other weather broadcasts.
So now I feel safe knowing that Officer Igor is on the watch.
Igor the Younger has noticed that police officers carry radios much like Grandpa's (a little VHF handheld I use to access the local repeaters) and they wear their microphones on their uniform shirt up near their ears. I call those their epaulets but I don't know if that's the proper word for them.
At any rate he will come in and ask, "Grandpa, can I play Officer Igor?" I, being an accommodating mad scientist, want to facilitate his play time and stir his imagination, so I take my handheld, clip it to his belt, clip the microphone to his collar (because his shirt doesn't have anything that looks like a epaulet) and send him off to serve and protect.
At first I was a bit worried that he would key the microphone and cause me some problems, because unlicensed operators are frowned upon in the ham ranks, even if they're four-year-old policemen. Then I came up with an ingenious plan to keep everyone involved out of trouble. The handheld has a number of non-ham channels programmed into it, including three local National Weather Service channels. I just set the handheld to one of the weather channels and we pretend it's the dispatcher. He's happy, I'm happy, and about the worst that can happen is he runs the battery down. I know how to recharge it.
Ah, but couldn't he change the channel and end up on an unauthorized frequency? There's a two-button combination that locks the keypad so he stays on the weather broadcast, and even if he were to somehow unlock the keypad, the weather broadcast is surrounded by a couple of other weather broadcasts.
So now I feel safe knowing that Officer Igor is on the watch.