[CQ-Contest] anti-contest petition MMSN

[Ryan Jairam]

Ham radio is primarily a hobby service.

Depending on a hobby to save your life is rolling the dice, IMO.

But I think you have hit an important point.  The sailing community
looks upon amateur radio as cheap HF communications at sea without all
of the rules and restrictions that commercial/marine radio has.  In
other words, they are using amateur radio as a way to get around the
rules, limits and restrictions that other radio services have, and not
because they want to participate in the amateur radio hobby.

This is normally not a problem, EXCEPT that now they are demanding
that hobbyist amateur radio operators give up a portion of our hobby
to support their use of amateur radio resources for what is
essentially a non amateur radio purpose.

It has happened with WinLink where PMBOs are set up in the PSK
watering holes, and the busy detection turned OFF on the PTC modems,
and now with the MMSN wanting exclusive use of a sub-band of
frequencies.  This is an entitlement attitude and is headed down a
very slippery and dangerous path.

The way I see it is that ham radio frequencies is and always should be
on a "first come first serve basis"  except when there is a bona fide
declared emergency or distress call, which does NOT include a net that
might be around to handle emergency traffic.


Ryan, N2RJ


On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Bill Haddon <haddon.bill at gmail.com> wrote:
> RE MMRS Petition:
>
> I have a different perspective.
>
> For the last 17 years my family has spent Thanksgiving with members and
> friends of two major sailing clubs in the SF Bay area (we are not sailers,
> however).  A  wide variety of people have attended these gatherings, which
> are usually 20-25 people.  Without exception, members of the sailing
> community have high regard for ham radio because of the services provided by
> MMSN.
>
> It may be useful to look at the compilation of reported incidents at:
>
> http://www.mmsn.org/recent_events.htm
>
> MMRN is asking for about 5 or 6 KHz, a very small percentage of the 20m
> phone band.   It doesn't seem unreasonable to me particularly after reading
> the list of incidents that the group has dealt with.  These stories are
> similar to those I've heard from attendees at our Thanksgiving group.
>
> 73 Bill n6zfo
> _______________________________________________
> CQ-Contest mailing list
> CQ-Contest at contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
>



-- 
Ryan A. Jairam,