I Found the Dumpster Fire on 40 Meters

So there I was, casually tuning around 40 meters.

A little ragchew here. A couple of guys talking antennas there. Normal ham-radio stuff.

Then I arrived at 7.200 MHz.

Oh.

Oh, wow.

For a moment, I thought I had accidentally traveled back in time and landed on CB Channel 19 circa 1985.

There were people talking over each other. People arguing. People arguing about the people who were arguing. Somebody was probably tuning up directly on top of everyone. Politics appeared to be mandatory. At least one person sounded like he’d been transmitting continuously since the Reagan administration.

And apparently everybody knew everybody else.

“There he is again!”

“You’ve been doing this for twenty years!”

“Get off my frequency!”

My frequency?

I just got here!

Then, somewhere in the middle of all this chaos, somebody started playing clips of Andrew Dice Clay over the air.

That was the moment I knew I had found someplace special.

I’m sitting there staring at my IC-7300 thinking, Wait a minute… am I actually on 40 meters?

Because suddenly it felt less like amateur radio and more like somebody had taken the absolute wildest CB channel from the 1980s, given everyone General-class licenses, and handed them 100-watt HF rigs.

I sat there listening with the same fascination you have when you drive past a dumpster that’s completely engulfed in flames. You know you should keep moving. There’s absolutely nothing productive happening. And yet…

you can’t stop looking.

That’s when it hit me.

This wasn’t interference.

This wasn’t poor operating practice.

This was nostalgia.

Suddenly I was remembering the glorious old days of CB radio—when every neighborhood had somebody running enough power to dim the streetlights, nobody waited for the channel to clear, and somewhere in America a man named “Thunder Chicken” was screaming “AUDIOOOOO!” into an echo microphone.

Apparently those guys didn’t disappear.

They got ham licenses.

And somehow they all agreed to meet on 7.200 MHz.

So if you’re ever peacefully tuning across 40 meters and stumble onto 7.200, don’t be alarmed.

You’ve simply found the dumpster fire.

Grab some marshmallows, turn down the RF gain, and enjoy the show.

And if you suddenly hear Andrew Dice Clay coming through your speaker…

you’ll know you’re in the right place.

73—and whatever you do, don’t ask who started it.