The Laughing Policeman Wireless Society

www.laughingpoliceman.com

Comrades, take a looksee at the site above. It's a window into a period of radio anarchy that's largely unknown in the USA.

Back in the seventies, on the 144 MHz ham band in the UK, repeaters were just starting to come into use. One of the first was GB3LO that served all of London.

It worked, all went well...

Then the pirates and anarchists showed up...

Next thing you knew, GB3LO and other two meter repeaters became a battlefield with the hams, the pirates and just about any other kind of crazy all fighting to control the airwaves. There were raids on hams by pirates, raids on pirates by hams, sabotage, drinking parties, desperate races across London in the middle of the night, really weird alliances and all kinds of nasty, deviant, fun behavior. Not to mention The unGodly, governmental heavy mobs and unofficial heavy mobs - all chasing each other.

Good times.

Nothing ever existed like this in the US, and I include the idiots in California!

Forty years on the names of characters like Squeaky, Grandad, G4DGK and GB3IDI (Idi Amin) are still remembered and discussed. They were bastards but they were funny bastards - as funny as Bram or Fearless Fred were/are. These guys had agendas, these guys had spiels, they became very good at what they did.

To this day I can still do a creditable impression of what Squeaky sounded like. And Grandad.

Take a look, dig around, these guys were one weird, little-known (outside the UK) ancestral branch of today's Pirates.