I would encourage listeners in the amateur community to augment Ed's
rebuttal - they clearly cropped his comments so sharply that they lost much
of the impact they should have had in a balanced presentation of the story.
NPR.ORG has a very accessible e-mail form, and they accept letters from
listeners and read a few of them over the air every week.
Be polite, avoid jargon, but let them know what a bad job they did, even in
the likely case that they will choose not to air your letter.
Nice to hear Ed Hare and what he was allowed to
explain about interference issues.
It was a damn small sound bite, and editorially seemed
to be an afterthought to a very promotional thrust in
the NPR story. Somebody probably told the reporter
"Hey don't you need some balance in this?" and there
you have it.
I remain convinced the group in Newington shot itself
in the foot on the BPL issue by portraying it as a
problem for ham radio. It allowed all manner of
critics to size it up as troubling only to an
eccentric group of guys playing radio. Too late now,
but the stronger approach would have taken Ed Hare's
good work documenting the interference problem and
then mounted a campaign to show how a variety of HF
users shall be affected by the problem. The NPR story
is the latest example of how the problem is marginalized.
