A Störsender satire by Hansl Hohlleiter
Helmut Heulton, OE0HHT, has logged exactly two hundred and forty-seven QSOs, most of them by accident — someone landed on his frequency and he responded out of reflex. Helmut doesn’t operate. Helmut monitors.
His shack — he calls it “operations centre” — consists of three scanners, an IC-9700 whose PTT button shows peculiar wear, and a homebrew 1750 Hz tone generator he’s prouder of than his licence certificate. The wall displays no awards, no DXCC, no QSL cards. Instead, a handwritten list. Two columns: “Allowed” and “Not allowed”. The right column is three times longer than the left.
Helmut’s daily routine is structured like a shift rota. From six in the morning, he scans every repeater within eighty kilometres. He knows every voice, every calling rhythm, every throat-clearing. He knows everything. He says nothing. He waits.
Because Helmut has a principle: whoever he doesn’t approve of gets toned off.
The method is simple and unchanged since the eighties. The moment an unwanted operator keys up the repeater, Helmut reaches for his tone generator. 1750 Hertz, clean, stable, perfectly calibrated. The repeater opens — and drops. Mid-sentence. Mid-call. Mid-CQ. Helmut calls this “preventive frequency hygiene“. The rest of the world calls it deliberate interference.
Helmut becomes especially active during emergency exercises. Not because he opposes emergency communications — on the contrary, he has three laminated emergency plans in his shack. But the exercises take place on his repeater, and the participants aren’t on his “Allowed” list. So: 1750 Hz. Every thirty seconds. Reliable as a Swiss watch. Last year the exercise coordinators changed frequency. Helmut reprogrammed his scanner and followed. He calls it “quality assurance“.
The tragic irony of Helmut’s existence: the repeaters he guards are dying. Not from overuse, not from interference, not from technical problems. They’re dying of silence. There are repeaters in Austria where not a single QSO takes place for days. And when — finally — someone calls, when a newcomer tentatively tries their first CQ, when a group arranges a round, when an operator returns after years of inactivity — Helmut is there. With his 1750 Hz generator. Closing the door.
Helmut’s wife Gerda once asked why he never talks to anyone on the radio. “Who would I talk to?” Helmut replied. “Those worth talking to aren’t active. And those who are active aren’t worth it.” Gerda nodded, because after all these years you don’t question every sentence. But she shook her head as she left the shack.
Sometimes, late at night, when all repeaters fall silent and only the noise floor remains, Helmut keys up the repeater. Not with 1750 Hz. Normally. He hears the courtesy beep. He waits. He says nothing. Then he releases. The repeater drops. Silence. Helmut sits in the dark and wonders whether anyone noticed he was there.
Nobody did.
What Helmut doesn’t understand — and may never understand: the repeater doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to the community. Built by volunteers, funded by donations, maintained by sysops who climb mountains on weekends to replace a faulty duplexer. The repeater is not a private channel. It’s an invitation. An open door. And Helmut stands in front of it, slamming it shut.
Helmut Heulton exists in every region. Sometimes it’s one operator, sometimes two or three who reinforce each other. They don’t recognise themselves as jammers but as “the last ones who still have standards“. They’re right — just not about the standards they mean.
Hansl’s verdict: Repeaters aren’t dying because too many people use them. They’re dying because too few dare to — and because a handful of disturbed individuals make sure it stays that way. The 1750 Hz tone was invented to open repeaters. That some use it to close them says more about the state of those people than about the state of amateur radio.
All persons and callsigns in this article are fictional. Resemblances to living radio amateurs are intentional but legally inconsequential. The author accepts no liability for spontaneous self-recognition.
Transparency Notice
This article was written with the assistance of AI (Claude, Anthropic). Editorial responsibility lies with the oeradio.at team. Feedback — including from Helmut — welcome at [email protected].
