Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
Agreed Dave! Hams are not necessarily electronics technicians or engineers.
Many simply want to operate with what they feel is the best commercial gear
their budget will allow.
However, very few hams have their installations professionally installed
and monitored, so hams do have to be technicians to at least a small
extent, unless they want to be limited in the same way as legally
operated CB stations. The very minimum they need is to be able to
recognize when a system exceeds their ability to evaluate its
interference potential and safety risks, and install it properly, so
higher powers need more technical skills. It's also been the case that
people have argued, on this list, that type approval should be abandoned
for commercial amateur radio equipment on the basis that all hams are
trained technicians, not that I agree with that.
(Low power users need technical skills in order to get the best of their
limited equipment, rather than for safety reasons.)
We've always had that disparity among Hams. Decades ago, before
"radiosporting" was popular, those operators were largely traffic-handlers
in the days when a telephone call to a city 100 miles away was both
expensive and difficult. Hams offered an excellent way for people to pass
In the UK, and I suspect most countries, such traffic handling was
illegal (recently there are some relaxations) on the basis that it
undermined the businesses of the telephone companies and commercial
users of radio. The current relaxations are probably more to do with
stopping the reduction in the number of amateurs self training than in
reduced threat to businesses, although the reduced cost of commercial
communication channels would be a factor, too.
The reason that the radio regulations have special provisions for
disaster relief are to override the ban on third party traffic in a case
where public policy considers that commercial considerations should be
overridden. On the other hand, spectrum pricing (creating a market for
radio spectrum) actually means that governments would prefer that
services not be provided for free on the basis of cheap amateur radio
licences.
--
David Woolley
"The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related to
Elecraft products and more general topics related ham radio"
List Guidelines <http://www.elecraft.com/elecraft_list_guidelines.htm>
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