I've read some of this thread. I haven't seen anyone spelling out the
raison d'être for amateur Radio. Namely the Amateur Radio Service is a
Service. It justifies its existence by the public service a tiny
minority of its members provide to the public in times of emergencies
and during practice for those emergencies.
Whilst no group nor net can "claim" a frequency, if one looks at the
situation from the "other side" the problem of communicating on 20
metres during a contest when a real emergency occurs is very real - and
valuable time can be lost if one needs to break through a contest pileup.
BTW, I doubt that FCC could, or would, go along with such a petition.
As others have said, for folks truly interested in communicating in
emergency there are many commercial channels available for doing just
that, with satellite telephone being one of the better services.
73 de n8xx Hg
cq-contest-request@contesting.com wrote:
> Message: 6
> Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2009 12:56:21 -0500
> From: Ryan Jairam <rjairam@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] anti-contest petition MMSN
> To: cq-contest@contesting.com
>
> Ham radio is primarily a hobby service.
>
> Depending on a hobby to save your life is rolling the dice, IMO.
>
> But I think you have hit an important point. The sailing community looks
> upon amateur radio as cheap HF communications at sea without all of the rules
> and restrictions that commercial/marine radio has. In other words, they are
> using amateur radio as a way to get around the rules, limits and restrictions
> that other radio services have, and not because they want to participate in
> the amateur radio hobby.
>
> This is normally not a problem, EXCEPT that now they are demanding that
> hobbyist amateur radio operators give up a portion of our hobby to support
> their use of amateur radio resources for what is essentially a non amateur
> radio purpose.
>
> It has happened with WinLink where PMBOs are set up in the PSK watering
> holes, and the busy detection turned OFF on the PTC modems, and now with the
> MMSN wanting exclusive use of a sub-band of frequencies. This is an
> entitlement attitude and is headed down a very slippery and dangerous path.
>
> The way I see it is that ham radio frequencies is and always should be on a
> "first come first serve basis" except when there is a bona fide declared
> emergency or distress call, which does NOT include a net that might be around
> to handle emergency traffic.
>
>
> Ryan, N2RJ
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Bill Haddon <haddon.bill@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> RE MMRS Petition:
>>
>> I have a different perspective.
>>
>> For the last 17 years my family has spent Thanksgiving with members and
>> friends of two major sailing clubs in the SF Bay area (we are not sailers,
>> however). A wide variety of people have attended these gatherings, which are
>> usually 20-25 people. Without exception, members of the sailing community
>> have high regard for ham radio because of the services provided by MMSN.
>>
>> It may be useful to look at the compilation of reported incidents at:
>>
>> http://www.mmsn.org/recent_events.htm
>>
>> MMRN is asking for about 5 or 6 KHz, a very small percentage of the 20m
>> phone band. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me particularly after reading
>> the list of incidents that the group has dealt with. These stories are
>> similar to those I've heard from attendees at our Thanksgiving group.
>>
>> 73 Bill n6zfo
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|