Bear ahead. Shooting skip. In the bushes.

To most of us, these seem like nonsense phrases, but to the Eastside Giggler, they are part of everyday lexicon.

The Eastside Giggler is Jenn Di Sano, web content administrator in the Wayne State University Department of Marketing and Communications. That’s her citizens band (CB) radio handle and she uses it every day to talk to a burgeoning community of CB radio users whom she calls her friends.

“I was never interested in radio prior to meeting my husband in 2003,” Di Sano said. “When he picked me up for our first date, he had a Ford Expedition with antennas and a radio inside, and he was talking with other people. It just seemed a little odd.”

By the time they got married in 2009, she was hooked. “I knew I was dating a computer geek and I was a computer geek too, so that’s kind of why we got together originally, but he also had this whole other thing going on with CBs and scanners. It was intriguing to me.”

It didn’t take her long to pick up on the specialized terminology that is part of the CB community. “Bear ahead” is a warning that police are lurking up the highway; “shooting skip” means conversing with people in other states or countries at a time when atmospheric conditions are ideal for long-range connection; and “in the bushes” refers to listening passively to a conversation but not contributing to it.

“It’s very social,” Di Sano said. “Sometimes we’ll get on the radio and invite people to the house for a barbeque and they’ll come over. In many ways, the on-air community is similar to the online community.”

The most telltale sign that Di Sano and her husband were fully immersed in the CB radio culture came during the five years they slowly accumulated the sundry parts needed to assemble a radio tower of their own.

“My husband was buying pieces of the tower incrementally,” Di Sano said. “An eight-foot cement base. Connections, beams, antenna. Finally, all the pieces were there. It just needed to be put together.”

One Saturday when her husband was at work, she decided to put the tower up to surprise him, with help from her cadre of radio friends. “It took about six hours to put the pieces together. I put a call out to the CB community asking if anyone wanted to come over and help me put this tower up. A couple of truckloads of people came over and we had it up before my husband got home from work.”

Although she no longer has a CB radio in her car, she’s still an avid CB radio enthusiast at home. “My living room was information station. An entire wall full of computers, radios and scanners running 24/7. I got very used to white noise.”

Di Sano said she has endured relentless kidding from her non-radio friends about her unusual hobby. “They definitely think it’s strange that we have all this equipment and a radio tower in our yard. But there is never a day that I don’t use it.”

And what happens if Di Sano and her husband decide to move? “If we ever move, we’ll take the tower apart and take it with us.”

Photos by E.C. Campbell Photography.