I follow the bandplan debate with great interest, albeit from the UK perspective.
Perhaps you are lucky that your national society does sometimes respond to grass root pressure. Here in the UK, those running our national society are not really accountable to the grass roots, largely ignore them, and get away with it As for experimenting, diy and AM, these do not figure high up in management's list of priorities. There are salaried staff to pay, publication deadlines to meet, and advertisers to keep happy. Granted there remain some volunteers who do good work within UK's national society, but mainly it is run as a business, or as one insider described it, it is now, first and foremost, a trade association, looking after the interests of the big dealers and advertisers. It seems though that membership of UK's national society is flagging, and gimmicks like one year's new membership for 10 gbp, provided you sign a bank direct debit form for the full amount next time, are now the fashion, and as everyone here knows, the management hopes people forget to cancel the direct debits. When we had new licensing rules forced on us a bit back, thus opening up the bands to every tom, dick and harry, unsuccessful attempts were made to change the official name of the hobby from amateur radio to hobby radio....a sort of amalgam between ham radio and CB. People who enjoyed experimenting, diy or antiquities like AM were regarded as dinosaurs. What shows is that so many of the new people, having licenses given on a plate or with their cereal packets, don't retain interest in radio very long. What we see here is an exercise to broaden interest in the dumbed down hobby, and poach computer addicts in order to sell more riceboxes. In doing that, it has alienated many one time keen mature hams. Our bands are quiet, if not almost deserted much of the time, unless there's a contest on. So I wish you all good luck in seeing off your national society management's bandplan machinations along with the IARU's attempt at self glorification. 73..Howard/G3RXH ______________________________________________________________ Our Main Website: http://www.amfone.net AMRadio mailing list List Rules (must read!): http://w5ami.net/amradiofaq.html List Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/amradio Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.html Post: mailto:[email protected] To unsubscribe, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.
