My Call Letters Revealed!
A big secret divulged to the locals thanks to a little thing called "Public Information".
In today's day and age of widespread internet access, Google, and all sorts of on-line databases, you can find out practically anything about anybody if you look in the right places. Certainly, the FCC licensee database is available for perusal for anyone so inclined, and there are easy to use on-line services such as QRZ.com which link directly to the Amateur Radio license database. Information is a freely traded electronic commodity these days, and people take that ease of access almost for granted. Certainly, had this level of access been around in the 1970's, I wouldn't have been able to keep my secret for as long as I did..........
This story started around Christmas of 1974. One whole year had transpired since I had gotten a CB radio transmitter powerful enough that it required an FCC license to legally operate. The year of 1974 saw me advance from that 1 watt walkie-talkie, to a 4 watt mobile CB on a homemade power supply and antenna, all the way to a full-blown base station radio with a 1/2 wave ground plane antenna. My signal profile had gotten considerably higher as a result, and I could now be heard as far as 20 or more miles away. But thus far, I had not bothered to get the FCC required station license to make my setup legal. For one thing, the purchasing of my current radio equipment had drained my supply of money so I didn't have the $20 required for the 5 year permit. Other factors, like many of my other friends being similarly unlicensed, made the acquisition of a license a back burner issue for me. I guess my earlier irrational fear of the "omnipotent" FCC had diminished as well. A scant 2 or 3 years prior, my friends and I were afraid to even attach a length of wire longer than the stated 5' maximum to our 100 mW walkie-talkies out of fear that the FCC would instantly find out and swoop down on us and haul us away to the federal juvenile detention facility for wannabee pirate radio geeks. But after running higher power stuff for the better part of a year, and getting to know other people who ran all sorts of exotic (READ:illegal) radio gear, including the legendary and much revered "linear" amplifier, our fear of retribution from the FCC steadily faded. But clearly my mother had at least a partial understanding of the ramifications of operating an unlicensed CB station, and as the adult legally responsible for my actions, she knew all too well what could be at stake. According to the FCC rules, regardless of the minor nature of such infractions as talking longer than the mandated 5 minute limit, an unlicensed station could be fined up to $10,000. So paying the $20 for a license was cheap insurance against such a huge monetary forfeiture. But also according to FCC rules, you had to be at least 18 years of age to get your own class "D" CB license, so my mother had to do it for me anyway. So what better Christmas "gift" could she get for me than the "official" permit which grants permission for me to legally operate my CB station? So it was that I got my first FCC CB station license. My license was an official looking document "suitable for framing", which was supposed to be on display at the operating point (But I hid it away for reasons soon to be revealed). My call letters were KIN-4577 and I was authorized for up to 5 transmitters. So finally I was "legal" or, more accurately, legal in name at least. It didn't take a rocket scientist (or a monitoring FCC agent) to realize that my operating practices were anything but legal. FCC rules for CB back then stipulated many things. First of all, the CB service was never intended to be a poor man's or kid's substitute for ham radio. Hobby-type operation, including the kind of round table chit-chatting we regularly engaged in, was specifically discouraged. You were only allowed to talk to other operators not covered under your station license for no more than 5 minutes at a time, and you had to take a 5 minute break (Which was lowered to 1 minute a year or two later) before transmitting again. The subject of your transmissions were also supposed to be of a "necessary" nature. Meaning, no idle chatter. You were also required to identify with your station call sign every 5 minutes, and when beginning and ending an exchange. You also had specific channels where you were authorized to talk between other stations, not under your own license (Ch's 10-15 and 23). And you had to stay on the 23 assigned channels, and you must not exceed 5 watts of input power. Since I was already experimenting, and working on expanding both frequencies and power, and no one in our group could truly enjoy radio with the draconian restrictions on talk time, operating strictly legal seemed out of the question. And like there is no such thing as being "a little bit pregnant", once you started breaking a few FCC rules, you might as well don your eye-patch, grab a sword, and massacre the rest of the rules too.
Logic then dictated that if you were going to deliberately ignore certain operating rules on a daily basis, it made little sense to announce to everyone (and the FCC if they happened to be monitoring from afar) just who you were by using your FCC assigned call letters. By doing so, it would be easy for the FCC to just mail away a NAL right to your door if they overheard you doing something wrong and then being dumb enough to identify yourself while doing it. So instead, we all adopted anonymous "handles" to identify ourselves and very rarely used our FCC call signs. But some in our group would throw their call signs out out when they wanted to sound "official" or when trying to stake a higher priority claim to the current slice of air-time (Back then, it was common courtesy to yield the channel over to someone making a call using "official" call signs). But occasional call sign use didn't make sense to me. In my wary and somewhat paranoid mind of the time, I figured that once you blurted your call sign out, anyone listening with nefarious motives (and we had our share of detractors), could make a note of it and use it against you in the future if/when the FCC did come to town. Adding to that, there were smart asses like Puddin' Head who would blurt out any personal information he could if he was in a heated argument. So, knowing all that, I made the firm decision that I would NEVER say my call letters over the air. I never volunteered them, and I refused to offer them up when asked (or demanded by some irate operator who felt he had a right to know). I was so strict about this, that instead of just giving them over the air like everyone else, I had to personally drive over and given them personally to the membership chairman of the Channel 6 CB Club when I joined (of which a valid CB license was a requirement), and made him promise to never divulge them. My strict adherence to non-disclosure of call signs might have worked out well for me, and nothing out of the ordinary would have happened had I taken a low profile approach to the situation. But as usual, sometimes I was my own worst enemy..............
As was typical for me back then, I never knew how to be subtle about anything. Instead of just quietly not using my call letters and avoiding any mention of the how's and why's, and not dwelling on the issue, I made it known rather publicly that I would never give them out and why I was so adamant about it. I chastised others who carelessly gave their call signs out, and I also stated that no one other than me (this was before the Channel 6 club) would ever know what they were. Actually, that was not entirely true, as my mother knew them, and so did Blue Bandit, but he was pretty good at keeping secrets and Mom never used the radio. But when you basically make something into a challenge by telling someone that they'll never be able to find out something, human nature drives people to make an extra effort just to prove you wrong. But I figured I had nothing to fear, as I was also under the impression back then that the FCC considered a license agreement between the commission and an individual, to be a private contract, similar to a social security number, and not something to be disseminated to the public at large. So I didn't think anyone could find them out, even if they tried. But I was very much wrong in my assumption. FCC license information is public information, but in order to access it, you had to drive to an FCC field office and page through hardcopy records on microfiche. Steve once tried to tell me this, but due to his questionable integrity, I thought he was telling me another one of his many tall tales. But this time I should have believed him..........
For almost 2 years after getting my license, my secret had been safe. In fact, because I steadfastly refused to ever give out my call sign, and no one had ever heard it, some in the group speculated that I didn't actually have a license at all. But I didn't care if they believed me or not, because I knew the truth. By the end of 1976, I had survived requests, demands, temptation, cajoling and other related inquiries as to my call letters. I figured there was no way anyone would find out, and I was rather smug in my assertion. But then an unrelated argument broke out, the details of which I've long forgotten. But somehow an unlikely alliance formed between Puddin' Head (Uncle Albert) and Steve. This was strange considering Steve had been responsible for giving Puddin' Head his much despised nickname, and he had been principally responsible for cutting his coax cable over a year prior. But suddenly, unbeknownst to me, Steve was now motivated to find out my call letters simply because it had been such a holy grail to Puddin' Head, who he was now (ever so temporarily) chummy with. Steve was always looking for ways to curry favor with those he was trying to pony up to. I should have been suspicious when a few days later he casually asked me what my mother's first name was. I didn't think much of it at the time, so I told him (Big Mistake). But since I still didn't think there was any way he could find the information out, I didn't realize what he was up to. But then one day shortly afterward when I came home from school, as I came up to my front door, I saw a folded piece of cardboard stuck to my mailbox with my call letters written on it. My jaw dropped and I was floored. How? Who had dimed me out? I was sure someone had betrayed my trust. But who? My mother wouldn't have done it. And I just couldn't believe that Blue Bandit would do it, especially after all this time. Then there was the channel 6 club records. I figured that was the most likely source of the leak. I was pissed that someone had betrayed my trust, and I would have a ton to say when I found out who was responsible. Well, needless to say, when I fired up the radio shortly after finding that cardboard sign, Puddin' Head was waiting to announce to the world my call letters. Suspecting something like this was going to happen, I had wisely also fired up my amplifier, so when he started to say them, I quickly keyed on him and prevented anyone else from hearing. But I knew I couldn't do that forever. Then Steve came in there shortly after, acting like the cat who swallowed the canary, and it soon was revealed that he was the one who had found out the information. I was shocked to learn that it was, in fact, public information. I didn't believe Steve when he had told me before. But he was right. Steve had gone to the FCC field office to take either a ham test or general radio telephone license, and while he was there, he took a small detour and had looked up the CB license database, and found my license records. I unknowingly aided his task by giving him my mother's name. Had I not done that, he might have had a more difficult time considering just how common my last name is..
Well, the cat had finally been let out of the bag. My well kept secret was no longer. But it was not all bad. I still never used my call letters, and when the big deal died down, most people had lost interest and I finally learned to down play the issue from then on. In a couple more years, my original license would expire and I was then old enough to apply for my own (for a greatly reduced $4). Having learned a valuable lesson, I obtained my new license quietly, and I wisely didn't make a big deal about it. I never used those call letters either. It was such a low profile issue that I don't even remember what those call letters were. All I remember was that they began with KBOU-???? The rest is a mystery. One that will likely go to the grave this time, the internet be damned!