> Rich says;
>
> >Are you familiar with the term "shaking-hands money"?
>
> No. never heard it before.
>
> >think they control the League by voting for ARRL Directors
>
> A bigger laugh is to think the directors of any national society of more
> than a handful of members (30? 50? 100 max) control it. Been there myself,
> done that...........
This stuff will go on forever!
In truth, copies of Rich's articles were sent to over a dozen people
NOT involved in any way with manufacturing or QST advertising.
The ARRL was very surprised when there were no favorable
responses from these people. As a matter of fact, the staff at QST
went out of its way to find someone they trusted who agreed with
Rich, and drew a total blank.
This put the league in a serious bind, because all of the Handbook
information that was about to be used was found to be technically
flawed.
At that point QST's staff decided they were in trouble, and upon
checking found out none of Rich's work was ever reviewed. Rich,
like many authors, had a "green light" that caused QST to publish
almost anything he submitted.
QST's staff could do nothing but admit letters they had ignored for
many years were correct. (One letter was from Eimac, who
immediately after the first article attempted to correct
misinformation. That letter was "filed" at HQ for years without any
response.)
Rather than admitting a mistake they published the letters and let
the letters do the "dirty work". I did not and do not think that was a
good way to handle the problem. It keeps the real problem, a lack
of technical editing, from being apparent and shifts the blame to
outsiders.
The only reason excerpts from my letters appear so frequently is I
happened to catch the largest number of technical errors that
agreed with the independent reviewers. Because of that, I was
quoted in multiple places.
While some (but not a majority) of the letters used did come from
people connected with manufacturing, the truth is the actual review
process that turned Rich's green light off was accomplished with
people who were NOT advertisers or involved in commercial
aspects of amateur radio.
73, Tom W8JI
W8JI@contesting.com
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