Jack- Perhaps the question is- Were they being sent to Desecheo for contract work, and threw together a Dxpedition, or did they totally use their contacts to go there for the DXpedition under another guise? Who cares either way, if they had permission to land and occupy from an entity authorized by law to issue this permission. I think that is the question raised.
I don't know the motivation of the idividual who questioned the operation, but how would you feel if you had been working for months, maybe years to get legal permission to go there and were told no, no, no, there is no way an amateur radio operation will ever be allowed, then suddenly a DXpedition shows up? Could you resist the temptation to contact someone and say what the h e double toothpicks is going on, I was told no amateur operations were allowed?
Maybe that wasn't the individuals situation, I don't know. Perhaps the individual was just trying to see if the Dxpedition really had permisison, and didn't realize all the fuss it would cause. Maybe they were jealous and ticked off because they weren't allowed. We may never know. But before the DX community sends out a hit man, at least try to understand how such an individual may have felt about the situation.
The fact that legal charges at one point were considered makes me think that at minimum the person giving verbal permission didn't really have the authority to do so. Maybe I'm wrong about that, and perhaps if that was the case the DXpeditioners didn't know that at the time. As I said before, for a previous DXpedition we were told to just go without permission by the person in charge, because they wouldn't enforce the rules as written. I am sure if we did that, and our DXpedition was questioned, we would be in a similar pickle, even though technically we had "verbal permission" for the operation. But, that individual did not have legal authority to give verbal permission, and we knew it.
73, Duane, WV2B
"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."-
Ralph Waldo Emerson
