ROTA-Radio

How Radio Delinquency Begins

Earlier this week, I had a strange and somewhat scary experience. During my usual morning walk, instead of it making me feel alive and raring-to-go, I felt bored, aimless, and hopeless instead. I’m not one to take cues from my mood. Normally, I’m driven by my thoughts rather than my feelings. In fact, my wife and I often clash over those primary differences in our personalities. This time, my dark mood got the better of me. 

When I returned from my walk I decided to grab a cup of coffee and take a golf cart ride to see if I could snap out of it. Coffee + a spin on the golf cart almost always gets my creative juices flowing. Hopefully, the ride would also lighten my mood. Although I knew I had “work” waiting for me at home—more legal stuff for my lawyer, Ted—I set off on my golf cart anyway. I didn’t have much time to spare because of an afternoon appointment and some deadlines for Ted looming over me. I think that was part of why my mood had become so sour. The more I thought about it while driving around the neighborhood, the more I realized that my daily routine lately was starting to “squeeze” the life out of me. I have no time for radio therapy, no time to show my radios a little love. Between the time crunch, the heat and humidity, and the daily lightning that forces me to unplug my antennas more often than not, all I seem to be doing lately is working as a combo caregiver + legal assistant. My retirement dreams are nowhere to be found. How depressing!

Normally, it’s on my golf cart that my ideas for operating portable radio take shape. I’m sitting on a 5kWh battery pack with so much “potential” for powering Starlink, my Clearnode Allstar node, and my IC-705 rig that’ll get me on HF, VHF, and UHF from anywhere my golf cart takes me. The only thing I’m missing is the time to play with all of this technology. I haven’t turned on a radio for about three weeks now, and it’s starting to get to me!

Talk Therapy

I’m a talker. I believe in the benefits of “talking it out”, but who else besides you would understand my dilemma? Only another radio nerd will understand the frustration of having radios all around me, but no time to turn them on and just listen, let alone talk. So, I’m analyzing my feelings right here and now. If I can “see” them, I can usually, eventually, understand and deal with them. For me, understanding my “down” times usually helps me feel better pretty quickly. Then, I can finally do something about it. In the case of my down day earlier in the week, I needed to do tasks for my lawyer, then take a shower and head off to my afternoon appointment. As the psycho-nerds like to say, I had to just “stuff my feelings” and keep going. Get moving, old man! [Disclaimer: I am a psycho-nerd with a master’s degree in counseling. It takes one to know one!]

Something similar happened in the mid-2000s. Back then, it came on gradually, unlike my “episode” earlier this week. Over the course of several months when I was super-busy at my job as a teacher, I just began to leave the radio OFF more than I turned it ON. My family grew from just Sue, our son, and me living in our large pool home together, to two couples getting together around the pool in the evenings when he got married to a gal who worked at our church. They would come over to swim after work, and we had great times together. Over the course of the next few years we were blessed with three wonderful grandchildren. We did lots of grandparenting and loved it like nobody’s business. Our three favorite months as teachers—June, July, and August—were filled with full days of grandparenting fun with first one, then two, eventually three little people who had their own room at our house (with a closet that doubled as grandpa’s  “radio shack”). My favorite people in the world call me “grandpa”! I was happy to devote most of my free time back then to being a part of their lives and watching them grow up. That said, grandkids and family obligations, plus teaching, plus lesson planning and paper grading all took their toll on my radio playtime for about a decade, maybe a little longer, in the early to middle 2000s. 

When we moved to a mobile home community with 5 pools and a golf course in 2016, I suddenly eliminated the role of pool caretaker, landscaper, and grass cutter from my weekly routine. The grandkids, Sue, and I would take long rides together on the golf cart around the golf course in the evenings after all the golfers stopped sending their projectiles everywhere. We all loved it, and the kids especially loved it when grandpa “went fast” over the hills surrounding the 27 holes around the golf course. Life was grand for about a year there until Hurricane Irma hit just days after Sue took a nosedive at work and broke her kneecap. 46 days later she came home from the hospital with strict orders to keep her left-leg straight for 13 weeks, and my role as a caregiver for my wife began. Needless to say, all of these ingredients are the stuff that creates an environment for Radio Inactivity.

Fast forward to today. I’m retired, so no more work distractions. The grandkids are now teenagers with friends, school, and other activities that keep them busy and absent from our home more often than not. Thankfully, they all still come around to visit with grandma and grandpa quite often, but it’s different than when they were little, as it should be. And, I’m now a full-time caregiver. For the most part, it all balances out nicely, and usually my routine allows me more than enough time each day to play around with my hobby activities and to enjoy the radio therapy I’ve loved since I was a teenager. But, not lately. Not with all this legal stuff and some significant deadlines to get everything together for Ted, the lawyer. That multi-month project has pushed me over the top. That, my friends, is the Anatomy of a decline into Radio Inactivity. Once again, I’m experiencing the squeeze of life which is sucking the fun out of my daily existence. It’s not fun, and I don’t like it. The difference this time? I’m not going to take it without a fight!

Fighting Back

In the early to mid-2000s, my slow decline into inactivity as a radio operator took over a decade to reverse. It was hard to build a little radio therapy into a busy life that revolved around family and work. It took a while, but a few years before retiring I slowly dragged myself back into a routine of radio play—first with a simple DMR Plug ‘n Play kit from a well-known advertiser in QST magazine. Later, I sold my old and non-working Yaesu gear to buy an Icom 7300. I also put my Echolink node back on the air and found time for solo rides around that golf course with my VHF HT, reconnecting with old friends from the 1990s using Echolink. Finally, I discovered YouTube elmers who gradually taught me how to make my own portable HF wire antennas that would fit into a mobile home lot or into a backpack that I would take to a local POTA park to operate for a couple of hours. Those were the ingredients that very gradually brought me back to life as a ham operator!

This time around, the scenery and the circumstances are different. Instead of work and family commitments, I have a full-time job as caregiver to my wife. I love that job because I love my wife. Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s still a job and I’m always “on call”. However, it comes with plenty of little blocks of “free” time where I can jump on the golf cart or head to the recliner to snatch an hour of radio therapy. What I’m realizing as I “think out loud” here on my Macbook Air is this: it’s up to me. I can let my brain take a break and my emotions will take over. I can be another kind of “sad ham” who mopes around, complaining about having no time to “touch a radio every day” (a nod to my friend Tom, KJ7T), and slowly drift back into Inactive Radio Operator mode. Or, I can fight back and squeeze even just a few minutes of listening during downloads of financial documents or between breakfast and lunch duty each day. The time is there, I just need to make sure I don’t waste it by feeling sorry for myself.

Thank You!

Ahhh, thanks for listening. I feel better already, and I know that I can squeeze at least a few hours out of the 168 God gives me each and every week. Those few hours can be devoted to the hobby I’ve loved for 56 years, even if I haven’t been on the air the whole time. I can show up now and make the most of every moment.

Oops! It’s almost 0800 and time to make breakfast. Which means, since it’s Saturday, I’m again gonna be late for my 0700 posting of the weekly article for rota-radio.com. Oh, well, better late than never! After breakfast, maybe I can enjoy a few CW QSOs before the rain and lightning starts this afternoon. That sounds like fun!

73, Paul

N4FTD