[CQ-Contest] IRLP

[WI8W]

I have been reading with interest and feeling some disgust at the 
comments made by many on this list regarding IRLP.

Someday in the future, technology will supplant radio communications 
with some other medium that probably has not even been thought of.  If 
you do not believe that,  remember that at one time people said that man 
would never fly, that man could never travel faster than a running horse 
and that electricity was a figment of someones imagination.  There are 
many other samples of man's unwillingness to accept that something they 
believed in would be proven totally misguided and dead wrong.

I have a long time ham friend who now is living in a nursing facility 
and will do so for the rest of his life.  He has no access to a radio of 
any kind.  This facility has so many electronic and medical devices that 
it would make a NASA Engineer beam from ear to ear. I leave my HT and 
cell phone in my car when I visit him.  One thing he does have though is 
a computer and a high speed internet connection. Echolink and IRLP are 
his only sources of outside communications.  To the misguided individual 
that said you cannot have IRLP without a radio...my friend you are dead 
wrong.  Like I said,  my friend does not even own a radio.  I know, I 
set up his Echolink and IRLP connections myself.

To the rest of you that have taken it upon yourselves to blast the IRLP 
system as not being "amateur radio"  I invite you to
remember also that someday you may also end up like my friend..I wonder 
then,  if you will have the same opinion of IRLP.


Try to have a great evening

73

Thom WI8W