A Jammer satire by Hansl Hohlleiter
There are radio amateurs who share their knowledge. And then there is Wilfried Wasserzeichen, OE0WWZ, who licenses it. The distinction is sacred to him, and he defends it with a fervour one would have wished he had reserved for an actual creation of his own.
Wilfried has a homepage. On this homepage stand things that exist everywhere: a repeater list, a few talkgroup numbers, a CTCSS table exactly as printed in every data sheet on earth, and the insight that 88.5 hertz are, in fact, 88.5 hertz. None of it did Wilfried invent. The frequencies were laid out by physics, the talkgroups decided by a committee, the tones fixed by a standard from the seventies. Wilfried typed them up. And in the act of typing — this is the decisive moment — something came over him: the feeling of being an author.
Ever since, beneath every page stands a sentence that Wilfried himself regards as his true life's work: „All contents of this page are protected by copyright. Copying, not even in part, is expressly forbidden." Picture that. Not even in part. So whoever copies the number 232 from Wilfried's page in order to know which talkgroup is Austria commits, in Wilfried's world view, a breach of the law. The number 232. The one that is on the air on every second repeater in the country, free of charge, audible to anyone, for years now.
The beautiful thing about the copyright cavalier is that he takes himself for a keeper of the Grail, while in truth he is building a fence around a meadow that belongs to everyone. Amateur radio — one must, sadly, put it that bluntly — is the one great cultural craft founded entirely on the opposite of Wilfried. We are the hobby of open homebrew, of shared schematics, of „take my antenna calculation and make it better". Whole operating modes came into being because someone gave away their source code. And there in the middle of it stands Wilfried, slapping a watermark onto a frequency list.
The watermark, by the way, is Wilfried's pride and joy. A delicate, semi-transparent „© OE0WWZ" laid diagonally across the table, so that nobody dares get the idea of using civilisation's control tones without his blessing. That the watermark renders the table unreadable in places does not trouble him in the slightest. Better unreadable and protected than readable and free. That is, if you like, his entire philosophy captured in a single image.
But Wilfried does not only have a homepage — Wilfried also has groups. One for every subject: one for DMR, one for D-STAR, one for Fusion, neatly separated, because a single word about the wrong mode in the wrong group and Wilfried steps in personally. Off-topic, with Wilfried, is not carelessness — it is a criminal offence. You get the sense that in Wilfried's ideal world every sentence would have its own group, so that nothing could ever get muddled.
And help? With Wilfried that exists in one single place: in the group. Write an e-mail — pointless, he does not answer those. Phone him — out of the question entirely. „It's all in the group", says Wilfried, meaning that group in which you are not allowed to ask anything that does not fit the topic exactly. The newcomer who does not know which of the seven groups his question even belongs in has already lost: in the wrong one it is off-topic, in the right one he has never been — because he had no idea it existed. And so the circle closes, and Wilfried is proven right once more: nobody asked properly, after all.
Which brings us to Wilfried's second-favourite discipline — starting things. Wilfried loves to start something big: a new project, a new list, a new group, solemnly announced. Then comes, as reliable as the amen in church, the phase of public whingeing: nobody helps out, everyone is just a consumer, the world is ungrateful. And then, just as reliably, Wilfried stops again — until the next big beginning. You could set your watch by it, had Wilfried not thoughtfully pointed out that the time of day is, of course, protected by copyright.
Ask Wilfried why he does it, and you get a surprisingly honest answer. It is not about the money — he sells nothing. It is about recognition. About the feeling that the things that have passed through his hands thereby become a little bit his. And there, for a brief moment, it becomes almost touching. Because at heart Wilfried wants only the same as all of us: for his work to be seen. He has merely, tragically, confused work with ownership.
And yet the road to recognition would be so simple. You share a good repeater list, keep it current, help a few newcomers — and there stands your name beneath something useful, entirely without a watermark. In amateur radio you earn recognition not with a copying ban, but with a reason to copy. People do not link to what is forbidden. They link to what helps.
But that is an insight you cannot put to Wilfried in writing. Not because he would fail to understand it — but because he would otherwise print the message out, apply a watermark, and hang it on the wall as his intellectual property.
So let us leave him his 232. He may keep it, frame it, watermark it and guard it day and night. The rest of us simply pass it on — out loud, free, and to anyone, as befits amateur radio.
And there lies Wilfried's whole quiet punchline: the only thing that truly belongs to him in the end is the copying ban itself. The frequencies belong to physics, the talkgroups to the network, the knowledge belongs to all of us — only the ban, that belongs to him alone. And that, dear Wilfried, is the one thing nobody wants to copy.
And should you wish to copy this here, even in part: go right ahead. It is shared gladly, from the heart — watermark included, it says „for everyone" on it.
Hansl's verdict: The beautiful thing about amateur radio is that nobody owns it. A call into the band, and a stranger answers — not because he must, but because he wants to. That is precisely what the copyright cavalier never grasps: that shared knowledge loses nothing, but grows. Wilfried guards a fence, the rest of us build antennas. And the saddest line stands not in his small print, but between the lines — that he will never experience the one joy this hobby gives: being copied because you helped. So, Wilfried: open the group, throw away the stamp, just say the 232 out loud. We are listening. Word of honour — entirely without a form to fill in.
All persons, callsigns and watermarks in this article are entirely fictional. OE0WWZ is a non-callsign and stands for nobody in particular. Any resemblance to living radio amateurs is purely coincidental, in so far as nobody feels addressed — and intentional, in so far as they do. The author accepts no liability for spontaneous self-recognition, not even in part.
Transparency Notice
This article was researched and written with the support of AI (Claude, Anthropic). Illustrations used were, unless otherwise indicated, created with AI (ChatGPT/DALL·E, OpenAI). Editorial responsibility and content review rest with the oeradio.at editorial team. Feedback — without a watermark, too — is welcome at [email protected].
