last updated 21 July 2003 How to shake off wallies Techniques refined back in the 1980s on CB radio, for getting rid of nuisances. Basically, if a wally is interrupting your communications, the one thing you can use to advantage is that children get bored very quickly. The key tactic is to wait, and possibly change channel so that they can't annoy you in the meantime. You're chatting to your mate a mile away, and someone in between can jam you because they're a stronger signal and overide your mate's weaker signal. What to do? Get angry and tell them where to go? NO! That makes their day, and makes them hang around longer. The best thing to do is ignore them BEFORE they realise that they have the power to disrupt you - after all, for all they know you and your mate could be so nearby to each other that they can't actually cause a problem. But if it's too late for that, try the following (techniques have to be known to both parties and arranged before hand). "Go to Channel W" you say. This gets the wally going on search for where you've moved to.. but in actual fact the W stands for Wait and you haven't gone anywhere! If you wait for 10 minutes the wally hasn't a clue where you went, and after 5 minutes get bored and goes to do something unpleasant somewhere else. Works like a charm! "Go to Channel Hotel" you say. Here, H (Hotel) stand for Home, your secret calling channel. If the wally thinks you'll eventually come back on the channel where you were originally, Channel W will not shake them off. In that case, you standby on your home channel and wait. After 10 minutes, make quick contact and move to yet another channel. If the problem returns, repeat as many times as it takes. They'll have to be very quick to find what your home channel is, as you never chat there! Simple Channel Changes If that's all to much hassle to arrange with someone, and changing channels is all you're after (maybe to avoid sensible users who appear on 'your' channel while you're standing by, without them knowing where you're moving to). In this case, a simple code will do. Any code. Phonetics of your choice. Tango Charlie, whatever. When this code is issued, you and your mate both change a pre-arranged number of channels up or down. 3 is the magic number On 446, moving three channels works out nicely - it gets you well away from the previous channel, and covers all eight channels in eight moves : 1,4,7,2,5,8,3,6,1! You could combine it with a change of CTCSS tone too, and a small wait.. a curious user of the previous channel would find it harder to find you. Steps of 3 also work well with the 38 CTCSS tones : 1,4,7.. 37,2,5..35,38,3,6..36,1 etc. They worked OK on 40 channel CB as well, taking you on a sequence through 1 to 40, 3 to 39, 2 to 38 and around again. Steps of 7 and 9 work with 38 and 40 too, and probably 11 but I can't face trying it out... You could work out a coded way of saying which new channel to move to. "Oscar 2" might mean go to channel 2 and then go up another channel. Another technique is to meet on any new channel and establish contact with the number of the next channel to move to... i.e. we were on CB channel 23 and we knew that 35 would be next. Up comes Wally, and depending on the location of Wally, usually one of us could overide Wally and make ourselves heard to the other one of us, so using that direction of comms, we'd say our code word and move to 35. On 35 we'd wait a moment (or perhaps straight away if the wally was happily playing music back on 23) we'd make contact with "12 next".. "Ok, 12" and continue our chat on 35. If Wally found us again, we'd issue the code and vanish to 12... etc. This, and Channel Hotel without much of a wait, were the techniques we often used when we didn't really want to wait about all the time - we wanted to chat. It would often take Wally a while to get bored of it, but when they realised we really weren't too bothered about them, they'd eventually leave us alone. Sometimes we really had to resort to 'waiting tactics', and that finally shook them off. Thankfully, the wallies were usually just bored infantiles, rather than pure evil.. we never had to resort to tracking them down and sticking a pin through their coax, LOL! Often it was much simpler than this - Wally would transmit for so long that one of us could tell the other the next channel to go to while the wally was busy doing what wallies do best, so no codes were needed. They wouldn't have a clue what was happening when they stopped keying their mic and we'd gone. If they found us again they might try to keep things short to make it harder for us, and THEN we'd resort to countermeasures. They all got bored in the end. One other approach worked numerous times. We'd be chatting away happily, and up comes a silent carrier for a moment. Now, we could have immediately got annoyed or resorted to avoidance tactics, but it was surprising how many times it paid off to simply say "breaker on the side, we can't anything you're saying. Maybe your mic is broken?". Often there'd be pause, and then someone very polite and friendly would come back saying how they'd checked/tightened their connections or swapped mics, and could we hear them now? Problem avoided, and often a nice contact would follow. They may have been calling on the breaking channel with people telling them to *(&% off, and not knowing why people were being so horrible. We were their last resort, and they were very grateful to find out what was going on. Well worth a try!