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The Folsom
Kindly Shut Your Noise Hole.
Premium
join:2003-01-31
Yucaipa, CA
 ·Verizon FIOS
1 edit | reply to GoodBuddy
Re: Good
GoodBuddy, I'd like to respond to your last post, but allow me first to gracefully back peddle on the "name calling" I did earlier...I'm sorry.
That said, here we go.
Hams never thought we owned the FCC. Indeed, the FCC have made some rulings in the favor of hams and some against, so that proves only that they have procedures and we cannot change that.
You are probably right about FBI not responding to complaints about vandalism. But if they did, dismissing it because of whatever reason is not within their purview. They investigate. The US Attorney decides if there are charges to be filed. As to your assertion that teenagers would pin or cut coax, be real... That is a game that adults play. Most teenagers don't give a hoot about anything enough to do something like that. If they had the technical expertise to DF any ham, they are most likely going to be hams themselves and would not jeopardise their license by committing such a crime. As to your assertion that hams are spiteful, and hate to give up any frequencies, look at it this way: WE ARE NOT LOSING ANY FREQUENCIES HERE... We have no reason to be spiteful. We are not deliberately doing anything.
Hams have a fair share of HF spectrum which we share with other services and hams all over the world. Unlicensed operations have no priority to hams or the FCC or any other legislative or government agency or entity. That is the essence of "Unlicensed". The HF spectrum already belongs to the public; it just does not belong exclusively to BPL. The hams are not keeping you from using your applications. It's up to the FCC; you have already proven that in your post about the FCC reallocating 220 MHz. The ARRL does not have authority to make rules or keep anyone in or out of ham radio. The Morse code requirement is a separate subject altogether and does not warrant comment in this thread.
You have admitted to refusing to study for what you describe as an "antiquated form of communication" so you could "hook up with a group of radio snobs"... Reverse classism is just as bad as snobbery in my book, so please don't paint me with that brush. I have known hams to be as friendly as any other people I have met. The same is true for CBers with whom I associate, so there really is no comparison or need to over generalize. I would submit the social difficulty is yours alone. As to your claim of hams vandalizing other hams, you will have to do better than a vague, indirect accusation.
Your Pollyanna comment does not justify or prove anything. If you are going to cast aspersions, you will have to show some kind of convincing proof. Interference occurs when you own a crappy piece of junk. Any ham who would ignore reports of his station interfering to the point that the FCC had to step in and take action would either clear up the cause or have his license revoked. Believe me, no ham wants that. There are bad apples in every hobby; do you advocate abolishing all hobbies? Your assertion that there are a few bad hams in no way justifies taking down the entire HF bad just so people can have broadband.
You are right about the radio spectrum being a public resource. Allocations are made by the FCC, not hams. BPL benefitting more people than ham radio is not an issue. The two benefit different people for different reasons; just because you cannot or will not see the benefits does not validate your opinion. Hams need not move our operations to another part of the spectrum. If the FCC reallocates the spectrum in which we are now operating then we will cease operations there. But if we happen to step on your unlicensed BPL operation then too bad. If you want hams to stop so you can have BPL, then go to the FCC and make your wishes known. Don't expect us to step aside just because you want to come in and push us out of the spectrum we now have. Hams don't have to go out of their way to interfere with BPL; it's a natural result of the operation of the two technologies simultaneously. So if you want to have our part of the spectrum, you will have to go to the FCC. We're not going to step down just because you say so. We are not the squatters here. We are the licensed and authorized tenants of this parcel of spectrum. If you don't like it then get the FCC to evict us. BPL is the squatter.
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I once accidentally spilled spot remover on my dog and he disappeared. You know what I hate? Indian Givers... No, I take that back. »www.folsomtech.com | |
GoodBuddy
@168.143.x.x
| I accept your apology and in turn I apologize if my remarks have been unnecessarily abrasive. I think what I want to say now is that my remarks were almost entirely a negative reaction to other posts here, where hams were in effect saying the would go out of their way to disrupt BPL communications just to show that they had priority on those frequencies. I even saw a message here where some hams were talking about conducting a net on those frequencies.
What many here don't seem to get is that it's frustrating to those of us who are not in ham radio to see hams hogging all the spectrum they can and begrudging others the use of it. Maybe the hams in your neck of the woods got along fine with the CB'ers, but I will just say that such was not the case everywhere. And I will admit that some CB'ers deserved scorn, but hams seemed all too willing to tar every CB'er with the same brush. Anyway, that's old history now.
The real crux of the matter is this: Many people, particularly in rural areas, can't get broadband at all because there's no cable service (or the cable company won't offer broadband) and the phone company claims that you're too far away for DSL, if they even offer it. And even where broadband is available, it may be priced too high, or you may be forced to take a service you don't want to get it (such as basic cable, where maybe you prefer satellite TV). The electric companies go everywhere, even to places where there is no phone service.
The public wants reasonably-priced broadband. Compare the number of people using the Internet to the number who are hams, and if it were simply a matter of favoring the majority (by number, not by who is the most vocal), I strongly suspect that Internet usage would win. If you took a vote tomorrow of all the people in the United States, and said that we have a small slice of radio spectrum that can be used for either ham radio or for providing high speed Internet service to people who don't have it or can't afford it at the present rates, I think that today most people would side with providing Internet service.
However I understand the principle of "tyranny of the majority" so I would not necessarily say the majority should always rule, all else being equal. But in this case, hams really do have all sorts of frequencies they can operate on. What is so special about that particular chunk of bandwidth?
If you really want to reduce the demand for BPL, so that it dies on the vine, considering lobbying the FCC to stop forced bundling of broadband with other services, such as telephone service or cable service, and to make force phone companies to offer DSL to all their subscribers within a reasonable time - to do that they could simply reclassify DSL as part of the basic service that phone companies are required to provide. And maybe also to keep an eye on prices, so that rates don't skyrocket the way cable TV prices have.
I'm certainly not a booster of giving bandwidth to big business. In fact I kind of miss the days before cell phones came along, when nearly everyone had a CB in their car - you could actually reach someone (provided they were within range) and not have to pay a huge monthly rate for each phone. Another thing about CB was that for the most part, it was the poor man's way to use his slice of the radio spectrum. It may have been the garbage dump of radio, but you didn't need either a couple thousand dollars or an education in electronic theory to get into it.
And I guess that's my other point. One reason I personally tend to dislike hams is that they are a little like religious zealots - they think all the world's problems would be solved and life would be peachy keen if everyone became a ham. They just don't seem to understand that ham radio isn't an appealing hobby for most people. Spending hours behind a radio to make a brief contact with someone on the other side of the world, then sending them a postcard to prove you talked to them (I could never figure out the point of that) just doesn't have any appeal to most people. I realize that the hobby is much more than that nowadays, but it is still an expensive hobby to get into (assuming you are like most people and have very little interest in building electronic equipment), and if you don't enjoy playing the game of "my tower is bigger than your tower" it's not going to be much fun. And anyway, why do you need ham radio to talk around the world when you can fire up ICQ or AIM, or a VoIP program? Maybe you find it really cool to bounce signals off the moon, but I can't think of anything much more boring - there's so much latency there it's a pretty useless way to communicate, other than the "look what I did" factor.
Many hams are, pardon me for saying it this way, competitive nerds - each is trying to out-nerd the other. Most of the rest of us don't want to be that. We just want to use a little of those "public airwaves" to do something useful for us, and if being able to access the Internet is one such use, people should be able to do that. And maybe the hams should be gracious and step aside, or maybe they should figure out where a better place in the radio spectrum would be for BPL, and ask the FCC to put it there. But this attitude of "lets just do everything we can to make life hell for our neighbors who subscribe to BPL" is repugnant to me. And I must say, I don't agree that hams have any irrevocable title deed to a piece of spectrum - as times change, utilization of the airwaves needs to be re-thought, and it's not only the hams that have been required to give up space - what about the upper UHF TV channels, those were taken away from the commercial broadcasters!
That's all I have to say on the subject - I doubt most hams would ever agree, and would fight it the way members of a country club would fight off any sale of a portion of their precious real estate (but it could be argued that the radio spectrum should be more like a public beach, shared by everyone, with different uses at different times and on different parts of the beach. You might play beach volleyball there, but it's not your private court). BPL is a valid public use of the spectrum and it (hopefully) cannot give rise to the abuses of CB, or anything like that. | |
The Folsom
Kindly Shut Your Noise Hole.
Premium
join:2003-01-31
Yucaipa, CA
·Verizon FIOS
1 edit | Thank you for your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to elaborate on your position.
You raise some interesting points, and this is definitely an extremely polarizing issue.
Consider, though, the efficient "long haul" nature of HF. The spectrum that is proposed by BPL is 2-80 MHz. The HF spectrum is 2-30 (thereabouts) MHz. In order to facilitate the successful deployment of BPL, all of the services that presently are allocated to HF (not just the US, but all over the world) would have to be dismantled, as well as all the services that reside in the remaining spectrum of 30-80 MHz. This is just not practical. BPL has been tried and has failed in numerous other countries.
Hams have only a small portion of HF... Less than 10% of the HF spectrum is allocated to us. The reallocation of sufficient spectrum to make BPL feasible would completely eliminate our use of HF. This is not only unacceptable but wasteful. The number of people that would benefit from BPL in this country alone is vastly outweighed by the number of people who benefit from HF in all its numerous uses.
That hams are the only major voice in this matter is not hard to understand if you consider that there are government/public sector employees who have their own views but are prohibited by law from stating such. That leaves the private sector to hash it out in forums such as this; a virtual vacuum, wherein the only players are at each other's throats to get the last word.
Hams versus CBers: A tough nut to crack, to be sure. Naturally there are those who think the other is/are profoundly bad and has no place in the RF spectrum. I happen to believe that ham and CB are both valuable and viable for their own virtues and I accept both as such. There are many more problems, however, with CB that are due mainly to little enforcement by the FCC, fostering a free-for-all mentality that sometimes spills over into the collective opinions of many individuals... For good or bad this is merely a fact. There are CBers and hams who are not so good. But the majority of hams, as a percentage, compared to CBers, are good operators who police ourselves.
The people in the rural areas are not likely to get BPL. The cost of provisioning the lines with all the equipment necessary to provide the level of service that BPL vendors promise far outstrips the costs associated with upgrading and provisioning telephone lines and infrastructures with DSL. This is the "dirty little secret" the BPL vendors are not telling. For this reason(among others which have been exhaustively discussed) BPL is not a viable technology.
I understand your position and frustration about hams being a "members only" club, but we are not all like that. You may have met a few like that, but I assure you the VAST majority of us are not that way. We love RF communications for the sake of it and for the experimentation and everything else that ham radio has to offer. For myself, ham alone is not enough; I use CB, FRS, MURS, 49 MHz and any other radio I can legally get my hands on. It's about perspective; there are those who have an all consuming hunger for anything that they lose sight of what is important.
"Tyranny of the majority" is one I have not heard in a while... I'm glad that certain facets of our society are not "up for a vote", because this would disenfranchise minorities. The special attachment we hams have for HF is the ability to speak directly to another person on the other side of the world without having to be physically connected by a phone line or internet software. I admit this puts us at odds with the BPL/IP camp.
I would be overjoyed to see broadband in every household. I agree with you in that DSL must be rolled out to every house that has a phone line. It's a lot cheaper and more reliable than BPL promises to be, but the BPL vendors have not told the public about what the cost of deployment will be. That is a shell game that the customers are bound to lose. When BPL fails because of (legal) RFI, the customers of the utilities will be left holding the bag, because the investor's money will have to be repaid. Electricity rates will skyrocket and many people will lose their life savings, retirement, etc...
I understand ham radio is not for everyone. But all hobbies are like that. Not everyone "gets" another person's hobby. I think this causes a lot of discord on this issue.
In closing, your example of the HF spectrum being like a public beach is an apt one, but I would add also that BPL wants the whole beach, not just a portion of it. Hams have always been concerned not with preserving only our "fair share" of the spectrum but also the entire HF band for all who need it. BPL is the ultimate example of "bloatware".
Cheers.
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I once accidentally spilled spot remover on my dog and he disappeared. You know what I hate? Indian Givers... No, I take that back. »www.folsomtech.com | |
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