The purpose of the roger bleep

This comes about after I picked up a member of what I refer to as the 'Cleveland Burner Brigade' (a group of people that sit on UK19 and don't move and TX at too high a power in the Guisborough, Stokesley and possibly Yarm areas) using an overly long roger bleep in the sound of the horn from the General Lee in The Dukes of Hazzard, the other station using a standard beep as is acceptable practice if you must use one.

Now roger bleeps are useful on 11-meters/CB if the mode of transmission is SSB as that has no carrier and no other way of knowing if the other station has dropped the key, in AM and FM they find another use, they stick out in the noise better than the human voice so you CAN hear the station when they drop the key even if the voice is unreadable due to a low signal.

I don't mind roger bleeps being used too much on 11-meters though most legal radios do not come with them as a standard option, the ones I do know of that do are all of the President radios released in the last 10 years, this includes the Lincoln II(+) despite that radio being a 10-meter radio and often unlawfully used on 11-meters, the legal 27/81 radios of the 80s I know of that feature a bleep are the legitimate Amstrad 901s (both the Japanese made and Hong Kong made variants) as well as the nasty copies from Hong Kong that became a SpinneyTronic/Harvard radio.

Roger bleeps find their way into every PMR446 set on the market, and usually they are on by default, given the short range of PMR446 this is acceptable so if you do walk a bit too far out of range you can at least hear the other party has transmitted, and that can be useful given businesses tend to use these, shops for instance.

Unfortunately roger bleeps find there way into Chinese made Amateur radio gear, as most of this stuff is aimed at professional PMR markets in those countries, however this extends to 10-meter radios as these are often easily unlocked to work on the 11-meter band, examples of this are the AnyTone AT-5555 and radios derived from it (which is a commonly used illegal radio on CB), the AnyTone AT-6666 and radios derived from it (which is also commonly used illegally on CB) and as alluded to above the President Lincoln II(+), roger bleeps are never used in the Amateur radio world, no standard Amateur radio equipment features such a thing, and with CB-like features in some of these radios including roger bleeps (which in some are programmable to what you want) makes me wonder if the manufacturer wanted to target these at the CB market but to get around compliance testing they were made and sold as "10-meter" radios (I use my SS9900, an AT-6666 derivative, on 10-meters only).

I will be doing a video on this subject so do stay tuned to the YouTube channel, I will stress again that I don't dislike roger bleeps, I just see no point in them being excessively long, used to play tunes or found in radios that are used on the Amateur bands primarily.

73 de M0WNU/26CT730