A Jammer satire by Hansl Hohlleiter
Klara Kurzwelle, OE0KKW, is a radio amateur. That should really be the whole sentence. She passed her exam with nearly full marks, built her own dual-band antenna, and has been soldering since she was twelve. She just wanted to get on the air. What happened next had nothing to do with radio.
The First Call
It’s a Tuesday evening when Klara presses the PTT for the first time. The local repeater has been practically dead for years. An occasional carrier, some noise, once a week a “test, one, two”. Klara says: “OE0KKW listening, anyone around?“
Four seconds of silence. Then all hell breaks loose.
A woman’s voice. On the repeater. A real woman’s voice. Soldering irons hit the floor in shacks across the valley. Three OMs who have claimed for months that they have no time for radio are QRV within ninety seconds. One of them from his holiday. In Croatia. Via EchoLink.
The Spot
At 19:47, a spot appears in the DX cluster that will go down in club history: “OE0KKW 145.6125 YL!!! REAL!!! NOT A JOKE!!!” Three callsigns further down, someone asks: “QSL via bureau?” It’s a repeater QSO. Twelve kilometres away.
Within half an hour there are forty-seven stations on the repeater. Forty-seven. The repeater hasn’t had forty-seven users in the past three years combined. OMs who sold their rigs buy them back. One climbs into the attic and repairs an antenna that has been broken since 2019. The repair takes eleven minutes. It was never the problem.
The Pile-Up
What follows is the first pile-up in the repeater’s history. Stations calling over each other, between each other, through each other. One shouts “suffix only!“, as if this were a DXpedition to an uninhabited island. Klara works through the callers one by one. She does it calmly, patiently, with clean operating technique. Nobody notices. Everyone is too busy being nervous.
Meanwhile, remarkable things are happening in the shacks. OMs whose audio has sounded like a hair dryer in a bathtub for years are suddenly checking their deviation. One straightens his shirt before keying up. It’s radio. She can’t see him. He does it anyway.
The Expert Consultation
In her third QSO, Klara casually mentions that she built her antenna herself. A twinlead J-pole, neatly tuned, SWR 1.2. This triggers the second emergency of the evening: an acute need to explain.
Five OMs take turns explaining her own antenna to her. One starts from first principles: “An antenna, you see, is essentially the extended arm of the transmitter…” Klara built the thing. She measured it. She could recite the feed point impedance from memory. She doesn’t get the chance. The OM is still covering wave propagation. When she mentions that she wound the balun herself, there is a pause. Then he says: “Yes, but who helped you with that?“
The fourth QSO opens with the question every licensed woman knows by heart before her first logbook is full: “And the callsign, is that your husband’s?” Klara calmly replies that the callsign is hers, so is the licence, and the husband does not exist. In the background you can hear someone updating his QRZ bio very quickly.
The Assimilation
What comes next is otherwise known only from rare DXCC entities: the administration of the sensation. Three OMs propose an “eyeball QSO”, this week if possible, no obligation, the club round meets on Friday anyway. One offers to “check” her antenna. The antenna with an SWR of 1.2. One wants a photo for the club newsletter. She has transmitted three times.
After six days, the club board gets in touch. Word has it there is now “a lady in the club”, and they would like to offer her, entirely unbureaucratically, the board is very modern about these things, the YL officer position. Klara asks what the YL officer does. Nobody quite knows. There has never been one. There has never been a YL. The main thing is that she is now officially in charge. Of herself. As Fridolin Seilschaft learned long ago: those who hold an office are filed away. And those who are filed away no longer disturb.
Diethelm Besserwisser weighs in too. He corrects Klara’s statement about the repeater offset. Klara’s statement was correct. Diethelm’s correction is wrong. Klara corrects the correction, politely, citing sources. Diethelm has been remarkably quiet whenever she is QRV ever since. It is the greatest contribution to frequency economy in years.
The Only Normal One
There is, by the way, exactly one OM who has treated Klara exactly like everyone else from day one: Konrad Kurzruf. In the contest, he works OE0KKW in four seconds. “Five nine thanks QRZ.” No amazement, no consultation, no questions about a husband. To Konrad, Klara is a number in the log like any other. It is the saddest punchline of this story: the only person who treats her like a radio amateur is the one who treats nobody like a human being.
The Solution
After six weeks, Klara discovers CW. Not because Morse code is romantic. Not because of tradition. But because of a property no textbook mentions: CW has no voice.
On twenty metres, OE0KKW is simply a clean signal with a good fist. Nobody can hear that she is a woman. Nobody explains her antenna to her. Nobody asks about a husband. She works DX, station by station, calm and precise, and the other side sends “FB OP” and a closing greeting, and that’s it. A QSO. Just a QSO.
In the evenings, Klara sits at the key and is, for the first time since getting her licence, exactly what she always wanted to be: not rare DX. A radio amateur among radio amateurs. All it took was switching to a mode where nobody can tell.
You could call that a nice ending. You shouldn’t.
Hansl’s verdict: People keep saying there are so few women in amateur radio because women just aren’t interested in the hobby. Klara Kurzwelle was interested. She studied, built, soldered, passed an exam and pressed the PTT. And the hobby reacted like a pile-up chasing an uninhabited island. Maybe it’s not about interest. Maybe it’s about what happens when a woman shows up on the bands. If you want more YLs in amateur radio, there is only one thing to do: treat them like radio amateurs. Not like DXCC entities. Klara would have loved to talk about her balun. Nobody ever asked.
All persons and callsigns in this article are entirely fictitious. Similarities with real repeater rounds are purely coincidental, but statistically probable. The author accepts no liability for spontaneously repaired attic antennas, hastily updated QRZ bios, or newly founded YL officer positions without a job description.
Transparency Notice
This article was researched and written with the assistance of AI (Claude, Anthropic). Editorial responsibility and content review lie with the oeradio.at editorial team. Feedback welcome at [email protected].
