2007 Ford F-150 - Cheap wipers

I never advertised my handle or license but I did do something my wife and I would say other driver’s wife’s as I was not the only driver to do this did not like there used to be a TV show called have gun will travel we changed it to say have wife must travel.

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Police strongly advise against vanity car license plates of any type as a personal safety issue, especially for women. They call too much attention and are too easy for criminals to stalk drivers.

So, unlike many hams, I never got a vanity plate with my call sign. Ham call signs are public record that allows people to find the name and home address of whoever has a particular call sign. Only family, friends, and a few local fellow hams know my call sign.

That said, it is fun to decipher vanity plates.

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No I was informed it’s Taco Tuesday. Drive through only.

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Mea Culpa about CB licensing. Per a close friend who is a fellow ham, here is additional info which corrects some of my previous posts.

Citizen Band licensing was in place from Sept 11, 1958 until April 28, 1983.

Amateur Radio began in the very early 1900’s (approx 1909) and continues today worldwide.

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My fav, divorcee I assume. WASHIS Z

The CB radio law may have been on the books until 1983, but it was the most widely ignored and unenforced law in the country. When millions of truckers flocked to CBs in 1974 because of the 55 mile speed limit, the CB law became unenforceable. I never had a CB license and I never heard of a freight hauler that did. We got CBs because we were paid by the mile. If we had been paid by the hour, we would have gladly slowed down.

Before deregulation in 1980 most of the freight in this country was hauled by unionized, class 1 common carriers. Some large and some very small that were all required to charge the same price for the same commodity and that ran tightly regulated routes. Buffalo had at least 50 terminals for large and small carriers. I think only 2 remain today, Yellow/Roadway and ABF.

I know there were at least 50 because I worked for that many over the years. In a 40 year trucking career I only had 6 steady jobs. The other 44 were either part time second jobs or casual work when I was out of a job. Wetwonewts@gmail.com had a union hiring hall that you could call to get a job for that day and they would send you to a company that needed an extra driver. If you liked a company and they liked you they would call you directly and that is the way I got 3 of the 6 steady jobs.

I do have a story about windshield wipers. I as the first road driver hired by a MA company that opened a Buffalo terminal in the mid 80s. They brought a steady tractor to Buffalo for me to haul double 45" trailers up and down the NY Thruway and Mass Pike. Great Job, but the companies had peculiar ways.

They needed me to haul two trailers, but you needed a doubles permit from the Thruway. they could have sent for the drivers abstract by Fax or had someone from their Albany teriminal to get it from the DMV there. The same with the doubles permit. They would not pay for either one.

They were not expensive. To do it by mail from buffalo it two weeks to get the abstract and the form for the permit which my terminal manager fill out, then I had to mail the two together to Albany and it came in 6 more weeks.

This meant that for 8 weeks we had to send two drivers and two tractors to the meet point so the company could save under $50. Our tractors had no air horns, they are not required by law and A driver has scared a terminal manager that walked in front of his truck with one.

At the end of October, I told my boss , I needed winter blades on the truck. He said OK, but the next night when I came in he said the home office won’t pay for winter blades. I would have to buy them and go to the shop we used to get them put on. I told him that would happen when pigs fly.

I wrote the truck up once a week for wiper blades because that is about how long the summer blades would work well.

I got called in and the boss said, we can’t keep putting new wipers all the time. I told him fine, the next time I can’t see in a snow storm, I will call you from a thruway service area nad have someone come out and put new wiper on, I won;t have hours to complete the run and you will have no freight to deliver the next day.

He called the shop we used and told them to put on winter blades and just make sure the bill did not say winter on it,

+1
I knew a few people who had CB radios in their cars, and none of them had a license for CB use.

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I gotta chime in, being a licensed Amateur Radio operator since December 1960, still active. And I can connect it to windshield wipers. And to snow.

As Marnet and others have mentioned, for a ham radio license you have to pass a test on radio/electronics theory and practice, and on the regulations. (That’s all to keep you from interfering with other services, like aviation, police, etc.) In the old days (my days) you also had to demonstrate proficiency in Morse Code. There was no age limit for the license. AIR, the youngest licensee was five or six years old. The license gave you privileges to operate on a wide range of frequencies, which until just before my time included what became the Citizens Band. Depending on your license class and your operating frequency, your transmitter power could be up to 1 KW. You could use home-made equipment. You became known by your FCC-assigned call sign, like a screen name. (Hams were nerds before there were computers.) In some situations you could change your call sign.

The CB license required no examination. You needed only to be a USA citizen and at least 18 years old. You could operate only on the 40 fixed channels of the band, your radio had to be FCC approved, and your maximum transmit power was five watts. You did have an official call sign (AIR, it included four or five digits – KXX1234), but everybody adopted their own “handle”. Operation was restricted to local communication only.

Enforcement of the CB regulations was weaker than lax. People bought and used the CB radios without bothering to get the license. (Some were even younger than 18 :smile:). 150-watt “final” amplifiers became popular, even being sold at truck stops (in spite of several FCC crackdowns and hefty fines). The rising popularity of CB coincided with a peak of the sun spot cycle around the mid-1960s. CBers discovered that they could work “skip” – long distance communication. Three-element Yagi “beam” antennas for the Citizens Band proliferated. Some CBers even moved up to ham radio.

What does this have to do with windshield wipers? I can dot-to-dot from ham radio to college, to career, to meeting my wife. Very soon after our marriage I was driving my wife downtown in her home city. It was snowing pretty good (there’s my promised connection to snow). As we were going down the long on-ramp to the freeway, the left wiper arm of my old 1973 Volvo wagon broke off. Not the blade – the whole arm; nothing left but a stub on the spline shaft.

I pulled over (lots of room), got out, and examined the broken wiper arm. I realized that the right arm had the same spline-mount, and that the arms were easy to remove. I swapped the right arm over to the left side, and onward we went. When we reached our destination I called the nearest Volvo dealer (from a phone booth, with a Yellow Pages) and verified that they had the part on hand. Wife and I finished our business, and I drove to the Volvo dealer, bought the wiper arm, and restored things to original configuration.

My wife comes from a wonderfully accomplished extended family, where I was a novelty in that I could use a screwdriver for more than stirring paint. She was pretty impressed with the wiper repair in the snow. So was I.

Thanks for reading, and 73.

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@art1966 You just made my day with such an informative and fun post! I learned some about ham radio and CB I hadn’t known before.

I also admire your dot to dot to dot ability to connect multiple discussion points so colorfully and concisely. :+1::slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, it seems like a lost art to connect dots and come up with a complete picture. When I see four or five seemingly unrelated events, I start to connect the dots and surprise surprise what you will find. I was always good at doing the dot to dot pictures in comic books.

Like I said in another thread, I got my aviation radio permit just by sending my money in. I would never have passed an electronics or morse code test. I didn’t get any electronics until a few years later in the Army. My license doesn’t say what frequencies are allowed though so who knows? They have never canceled me or asked for a renewal though in 50 years.

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