Have deep personal pockets. Don’t be a chump… be a Trump… Andrew MacAllister | T +1 713 827 4334 From: BVARC [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Guthrie via BVARC Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 10:10 AM To: BRAZOS VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB Cc: Jonathan Guthrie Subject: Re: [BVARC] [tdxs-list] Fwd: P5DX What could have been
It would seem that the need to maintain secrecy is incompatible with the need to raise money from a lot of people. I don't know what you can do about that. On 4/27/2016 9:50 AM, WILLIS COOKE via BVARC wrote: The Ham Community gets and seems to accept the blame, but North Korea dictated unwarranted rules and the team accepted them. Someone on the team or at least trusted by the team spilled the beans. I probably would have missed the expedition due to local rain and broken antenna, but that is not the fault of the team or DPRK. What is not to be is not to be, but I would not have breathed easy if I worked a station with such rules until the ARRL had accepted the confirmation. I probably would have worked them on the off chance that they were legit, but I would not have contributed to a expedition with such rules. If you put up significant cash with no result, bummer, if not then you are with me and are wise. If you did, sorry about that, but you may not have been prudent. If you are the one who spilled the beans, then congratulate yourself, vote for Hillary and join the jammers and kc police in the place that you deserve. To the team, you are either heros or chumps and we will never know which. Willis 'Cookie' Cooke, ________________________________ From: Bob W5UQ <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]> To: ed <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>; "[email protected]"<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>; BRAZOS VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 9:29 AM Subject: Re: [tdxs-list] Fwd: P5DX What could have been I don't... bummer... Bob W5UQ On 4/27/2016 9:17 AM, ed wrote: Wow I'm glad I have P5 'in the log' ________________________________ From: Bob W5UQ<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: 4/27/2016 8:34 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; BRAZOS VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB<mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [tdxs-list] Fwd: P5DX What could have been Very interesting... sent to me by a friend. Bob W5UQ P5DX what could have been… Posted about 19 hours ago | 1 comment<http://www.dxcoffee.com/eng/2016/p5dx-what-could-have-been/#comments> from N6PSE <https://n6pse.wordpress.com/> blog P5DX-what could have been…. As a Blogger, my blog represents my thoughts and my views only. The content of this Blog does not represent anyone else but me. This morning, I had to cancel a DXpedition. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life. It was not for lack of permission, it was not for lack of a team and equipment willing to go. The prospect of a P5 activation brings out the worst in this hobby. The posers, the nuts, the ill-informed and the opinionated. But in the end, it mostly came down to a surprising lack of support and lack of funding from some of the world’s paramount DX foundations when asked to fund grants to the world’s #1 Most Wanted Entity. This is the story of P5DX. Throughout several years of ongoing negotiations, the North Koreans have told us that they have never before given permission for an amateur radio activity within the DPRK. Of course we don’t know if this is true or not as others have gone before us and have been approved for DXCC, but this is what we were told. We had hoped to be the first large DXpedition with clear and unambiguous proof that we were active within the country and with real evidence of permission. After tireless efforts, we finally had a letter of invitation in hand from DPRK authorities inviting us into the country as the first-ever large scale amateur radio event. In April, 2013, we informed the world of our “P5 Project”. We were making numerous visits to the DPRK and establishing real contacts. We were spending thousands of dollars of our family’s money shuttling back and forth from our homes to Pyongyang, and we wanted to give hope to the DX Community that an operation might actually take place. All told, we made nine visits to the DPRK. Despite several false leads, for the most part our efforts seemed pointless, unproductive and futile. Until recently, when we finally got our big break. As part of our P5 Project, we retained an expert in all things North Korea to work and lobby on our behalf. Our “Emissary” was very interested in our project and asked for no money from us. Our “Emissary” has strong relationships within the DPRK and regularly travels there. In February 2016, our Emissary contacted us while we were on the VP8STI/VP8SGI DXpedition. Our Emissary had been communicating with relevant DPRK officials and sensed a new willingness to consider our proposal. We renewed our proposal and the talks continued. When we returned home, we learned that we were very close to having complete permission. After a couple more months of back and forth negotiations, the DPRK agreed to a ten day amateur radio activity with three radios and up to 20 team members. A venue was investigated and approved. Like the 2012 7O6T Dxpedition, the DPRK officials wanted to showcase a new resort and offered it as a DXpedition location. Within a span of a few weeks our Emissary and one of our team leaders made a visit to Pyongyang to have face to face meetings with high level officials. These officials had been involved in Dennis Rodman’s visit as well as the just-completed Pyongyang marathon race. Now that the marathon was over, we had their full attention and cooperation. Things were moving fast. The DPRK officials stipulated that only three Americans could be on the team and no Japanese, but beyond that we were given the green light to begin assembling a team of varying nationalities from Europe, South America, and Oceania. The DPRK officials insisted on no publicity in advance of us going on the air, so everyone joining our team was sworn to secrecy. A website was developed but would not be launched until we were live and on the air within the DPRK. It was agreed that we would use the call sign P5DX. Our last major hurdle was that the DPRK was asking for a very large fee to be paid for the permissions at various government levels and ministries to operate from within the DPRK. It is a very common practice for various governments throughout the world to request a fee to be paid for DXpedition permission and licensing. These fees are typically several thousand dollars in many Third World countries. As we would see, the DPRK fee would be considerably more. While still trying to keep everything a secret, the largeness of this fee required that we approach several of the biggest amateur radio foundations for financial grants to help us with our tremendous up-front costs. We also consulted with an international attorney who counseled us how to avoid becoming entangled in violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Essentially, it is a serious crime for Americans to bribe foreign government officials. However, it is not a crime for Americans to be charged extra fees to visit a foreign country. All of our fees would be paid directly to a China-based tour company and no direct exchange would take place with the North Koreans. Given the outpouring of support that these amateur radio consortia had given to lesser-needed entities in the past, it never occurred to us that they would resist supporting a trip to P5. One organization actually said that we didn’t need their funding because we could charge whatever we wanted for the QSLs! It was a disheartening revelation that they seemed more interested in our ability to raise funds by charging high fees later for confirmation “because we can” rather than in assisting a major DXpedition that was in dire need of immediate pre-departure funding to pull it off. We later proposed that they merely pledge an amount to be donated if we were successful and our operation was accredited by the DXCC staff, thus giving them an easy way out if they were not pleased with our performance. This still did not sway them. Here we were, just a couple of weeks away from the first authorized multinational DXpedition from the world’s most needed country, and we were told we were on our own. I never thought it would come to this. I have tremendous respect for these organizations and I am deeply disappointed that they could not find a way to support our plans. This left my Co-Leader, David-K3LP and I no other recourse but to drain our own personal retirement savings to provide the bulk of our funding. In addition to our upfront license fees, we needed to buy radios, power supplies, coax, antennas and many more items. We purchased roughly $16,000 in equipment and we spent almost $4000 to ship it FedEx to Beijing to our staging area, where it still sits as I write this Blog. We continued to discreetly build our team [The entire original message is not included.] _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe or modify your subscription options, please visit: http://lists.tdxs.net/mailman/options/tdxs-list/wrcooke%40yahoo.com _______________________________________________ BVARC mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org -- Jonathan Guthrie KA8KPN
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