Originally Posted by s346k

out of curiosity. what is the benefit to ham radio? large investments to share a conversation with others..?

Originally Posted by BlueRidgeMark

Yep. I wish you were right Fred, but life ain't that simple. Just one example: when I worked in a radio shop, a fella came in to have his old school IMTS car phone serviced. This would have been about '85 or so. He was driving a Toyota extended-cab pickup with a fiberglass shell on it. The area behind the back seat was filled with RV deep-cycle batteries hooked in parallel, and he told me he had an oversized alternator on it to keep them charged. He was running RG-214 off his 1500 watt linear to the antenna mounted in the middle of his fiberglass shell. For a ground plane he had glued a sheet of stainless steel to the roof that pretty much covered the whole roof. He was using RG-214 because he said when he was using RG-8 he'd kill his engine every time he keyed his mike. Self-inflicted EMP, apparently. The 214 solved the problem for him.

He was operating on 11 meters with that rig, while his license was suspended for running too much power. It was not his first suspension. He was bragging about it. I wanted to spit on him.

Another time I installed a base station and 5 or 6 450 MHz radios for a business that had, for years, been using CBs with 150 watt linears. They finally decided to get legit.


Yeah, there are bad guys on both sides of the aisle.







No argument with the good that hams do in times of crisis. They have been invaluable during some of the major wildfire problems in southern California, for example, and during hurricanes in the Gulf states. They do FAR more than most people know.

But the rest of the time? Yap yap yap for the sake of yapping.

That radio shop I worked at was a hamfest a lot of the time. The boss was a ham, one of the salesmen was a ham, and that meant we had a 50% ham population in our shop. Plus, the boss was good friends with a guy who owned a string of electronic shops in southern Cal (Hurley Electronics, for any old-timers in So Cal). Since he had bucks, he could indulge his ham hobby so he owned a handful of 440 repeaters on nice commercial mountaintop sites. Not many hams have access to that! So he and his buddies often hung around our shop, thus the hamfest appearance.

Being a newly minted college grad-jee-eight with a degree in that kind of thing, I was initially very interested in the ham world. But listening to the drivel that passed over those radios from all these hams convinced me I wasn't interested. It was talk for the sake of talk. I have better things to do.

Originally Posted by Fred/N0AZZ

In the last 7 yrs funding was cut for FCC enforcement and the current administration has no interest in this part of that arm at all, in fact disdain with main focus being on takeover of internet.

Originally Posted by BlueRidgeMark

That really started under Jimmy Carter. The FCC has not been the same since. It's gotten more political, and less technical. Time was, FCC chairmen were chosen out of the ranks for their tech savvy. Now they are chosen for how well they will advance the administration's political agenda.