I agree, Teabag, its just amazing at how bad it is. Almost as if they've forgotten that they're on a public channel really. Meanwhile, the same blokes if they were in the company of women would be apologising at you for their swearing! I don't get it!
What really infuriated me whilst away was the people who thought that they could just use ch 5 as their own personal chat room. As an emergency services volunteer, my UHF is set to have ch 5 in the scan group and there was one day around Maryborough that it just kept hitting on this channel as two truckies went on and on about nothing. I was so close to picking up the handset and politely telling them to get off the emergency channel. I just couldn't bear to have the abuse hurled at me, however.
We did our best whilst away to get out of the truckies way. We'd call any up that were behind us, to get them to let us know when they wanted to come round us and when they did, we'd always let them know they'd clear us with a flash of lights. Often we'd get their thanks via indicator or UHF. Even still, I was amazed at how many of these drivers would often say that they didn't hear someone calling them up as they were on the phone! After this, I then took a good look at truck drivers passing by and was just blown away with how many were not using hands free.
At every chance we got, we used the higher channels for communicating. We were often on 64 but once we had two new travellers with us who had no new 80 channel radios we had to go back down, unfortunately. The radio is blissfully quiet up in the higher numbers as not many have switched to the new UHFs. It seemed that every other day we were having to swap frequencies to get away from others just randomly chatting. We avoid too much general chat as for us, the radio is for letting each of us know what is coming up and where we are going. If we want a general chat, we'll stop and have one!
