Journal ·
SOMEBODY CUT MY ANTENNA OFF MY CAR
My CB whip was stolen the night before Cucumber Day, and the only thing that fixed me was two metres.
I need everyone to sit down because I have been WRONGED.
So. Cucumber Day. It is a real festival, it is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds, and I had been planning my whole weekend around it for two weeks. Not because of the cucumbers. Because of the drive. Because the plan — the perfect plan, the plan I was so proud of — was to spend the entire road out there on CB chatting to truckers, and then get to the field and put out CW on ten metres from the middle of a cucumber festival. Do you understand how good that was going to be? Truckers on the way there. Morse in a field. That is a whole personality.
And then I walked out to the car.
And my antenna was GONE.
Not fallen off. Not loose. Cut. Somebody stood next to my car with something sharp and took my Optimum Saturn — my Saturn, with the silver coil, the one I picked out and fitted and tuned myself — and just sliced it off and walked away with it. There is a stub. There is a sad little stub where my whip used to be. I stood in the car park staring at it like it was going to grow back.
I want to be dramatic and say it is a tragedy but honestly? It sort of is. That antenna was not expensive the way a car is expensive. It was expensive the way a thing you chose yourself is expensive. I remember tuning it. I remember being pleased with the SWR. It was MINE and someone took it off my car with a knife.
I filed a police report. I did! I went and I wrote the whole statement out properly, brand and model and silver coil and everything, and the officer wrote it all down without laughing at me even once, which I appreciated more than I can say. I am not holding my breath. But it is written down somewhere official now and that matters to me.
So: no CB. No truckers. No cheerful nonsense across three hundred kilometres of road. The drive happened but it was just… quiet. And a quiet drive when you had planned a loud one is somehow worse than never planning anything at all.
I got home in the kind of mood where you just sort of sit on the floor.
And then I picked up the handheld. Because what else was I going to do.
145.425. Just called. Half expecting nothing.
And R3BGQ came back to me.
I don’t even remember what we talked about, honestly — the weather probably, the usual, how’s the signal, where are you. Fifty-nine both ways. Nothing special happened. Nobody worked a rare one, nobody broke a record, it was a completely ordinary local contact on two metres in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
It fixed me completely.
That is the thing about this hobby that I did not understand when I started and I think I am only understanding now. Somebody took my antenna. Somebody physically walked up to my car and stole a piece of my hobby off it. And then a stranger a few kilometres away picked up a microphone and said hello to me and I felt like a person again.
The Saturn is gone. I will get another one. I will probably get a better one, and I will definitely park somewhere else.
But today somebody answered me, and that turned out to be the part I actually needed.
73 and 88, Iskra