Sometimes instead of riding my bike I’d hop on the bus. One day a couple of years later a bus driver named Bob Arkow noticed I was wearing a T-shirt that said, "CBers Do It on the Air." He told me he’d just found a Motorola handheld that was a police radio. I thought maybe he could listen in on the police frequencies, which would be very cool. It turned out he was pulling my leg about that, but Bob was an avid ham radio operator, and his enthusiasm for the hobby sparked my interest. He showed me a way to make free telephone calls over the radio, through a service called an "auto patch" provided by some of the hams. Free phone calls! That impressed me no end. I was hooked.