[Fists] ARRL Study Stinks!

[Jeff Davis]

Al and friends...

This just seems to be so poorly conceived (the survey) that I still have a
difficult time believing that "intelligent" people had anything to do with
it.

I've been to a number of hamfests that were also attended by Riley
Hollingsworth. I've listened to him give the same speech over and over about
the enforcement problems in the amateur service. He has eloquently
elaborated his fear that some day soon some other service is going to want
our spectrum and some tech savvy reporter is going to record 10 minutes of
off the air audio from the morons who like to tell dirty jokes, play music,
and jam other QSOs. That 10 minute audio clip played on the NBC nightly news
could easily undo 100 years of dedicated public service by amateur
operators.

I've heard Riley play audio clips of these ridiculous shenanigans citing
them as examples of the enforcement problems that we face. It's downright
embarrassing to hear some of that junk. And yet in all of the problems that
I have listened to Riley expound upon, not one of them occurs on CW. I've
never heard Riley talk about an enforcement problem caused by CW operators.
Has anyone?

On top of that, we can all now clearly see that the elimination of the code
requirement has not significantly swelled the ranks of amateur radio. The
No-Code people were just dead wrong. There was NEVER a huge crowd of
would-be new operators with their noses pressed against the window of an
insurmountable code requirement for entry. Eliminating the code requirement
merely allowed a bunch of oldtimers to upgrade without taking a code test.

From my perspective, as a life-long member (and vocal supporter) of the
ARRL, they either are too ignorant to see where all of this is going, or
they have become an evil empire bent on the destruction of the hobby. I
refuse to believe the latter, but the former is nothing to brag about.

Increasing the bandwidth for rules violators to operate can only add to the
present FCC workload while increasing our risk that sooner or later, someone
with a brain is going to figure out that there are a bunch of (really) old,
fat, retired guys who are sitting on (literally) billions of dollars worth
of spectrum that they use to tell dirty jokes, belch into their microphone,
spout racial slurs, play music, and jam emergency net operations.

What on earth can the ARRL leadership expect to gain from this poorly
thought out concept?

73 de Jeff, N9AVG
FISTS #6641


----- Original Message -----
From: <ATanner283@aol.com>
To: <n9avg@worldnet.att.net>; <fists@mailman.qth.net>
Cc: <Wt8r@aol.com>
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 8:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Fists] ARRL Study Stinks!


> Geeeee.....We couldn't possibly see this coming could we????????  Al/W8FAX
> 2192                Extra.........heavy
>