Belonging to a Ham Radio Community Helped me Find More friends

Almost every youth loves to go out at times, mostly during weekend and have some fun, hang out with others in a party of even go out chasing after love partners. It very common everywhere in the world.

For long, I was a party-goer and never missed an opportunity to go out during weekend. All this was possible because I belonged to a popular amateur radio community which was filled with revelers, and thus we could network and schedule where and when to meet. I loved the whole bit of this because of the opportunities especially to meet and network with others because most of the times, any member of the community would come along with a friend or two.

This made networking much easy and fun while all along helping the ham community grow because we would encourage others to join us. Moreover, the more we grew in group as well as the more we got to know each other better, the more we reasoned of better ways to also better our lives (not partying only).

Unregulated Use of Ham Radios is Dangerous

But we had a problem after most of the hangouts, there were those of us like me who would take too much alcohol and end up in the wrong arm of the law when caught up with the authorities because of drinking under the influence of alcohol. As a matter of fact, I personally was caught 3 times and ended up paying heavy fines for that.

One day as we planned the party, I suggested that we have a special frequency whereby we could be alerting each other on radio matters – that is the radio where road blocks had been placed to catch drunken revelers who were driving home.

This worked fine for several months and we could communicate and warn each other and thus we were able to avoid being caught for drunk driving.

The more it was fun avoiding the authorities using these crude ways the more it encouraged us to even have more drinks than our limit.

One Saturday night after having more drinks than usual, I decided to drive my girlfriend home. As usual, I networked over the radio and knew which route was the safest to take and which to avoid. But I must have taken one-too-many because I was over speeding. My girlfriend didn’t see anything wrong with that and she in fact encouraged me because there was no way that we could be caught.

While still on high speed, I came towards a sharp bend and I failed to negotiate it because of the speed. My car swerved on the side on the road and skidded overturning about four times.

I fell unconscious to wake up in a hospital where I was taken. My girlfriend died instantly in the crash and I blame myself for that as I wait to be charged for careless driving and probably manslaughter when my case will be had in some months to come.