[RFI] BPL Protest Opportunity? Give up? NO!

[Ian White, G3SEK]

Hare,Ed, W1RFI wrote:
>For a rough estimate, *conservatively* assume 200,000 active amateurs. 
>Conservatively, do they have, on average, $5,000 invested in the cost 
>of their equipment, antennas, towers, feed lines, books, tools, 
>components, connectors and the host ofo other things that make up the 
>well-rounded amateur station? If so, the math is pretty staggering: 
>200,000 X 5,000 = $1,000,000,000.00. Just in the US, amateur radio has 
>collectively invested a billion dollars in its ability to volunteer its 
>time to provide benefit to the public.
>
>Now, this is not a scientific calculation, but only a personal 
>observation. But it isn't too far off the mark for my station, and I 
>have a modest one.
>

I'd agree with that rough estimate, but it needs to be broken down in a 
much more frequency-specific way, so we can answer questions such as 
"What if we lose 2 meters" - or in this case, "What if we lose HF?"

Ed has shown how you can often make quite accurate estimates from 
surprisingly little data [1]; but those are not the methods to use here.

I return to my earlier point: these are statistics that a national 
amateur radio society should have at its fingertips, ready to fire at 
the FCC or anyone else who thinks they can steal our bands because we're 
"only amateurs".

Rough top-down estimates are not good enough for that purpose, because 
those are always open to argument. The statistics  have to be robust and 
defensible, which is why they have to be collected the hard way: from 
the bottom up, by researching actual equipment sales and adding up the 
totals. And that is specifically a job for a national society.



[1] There's a wonderful book on this subject, which rejoices in the 
title of 'Consider a Spherical Cow'.



-- 
73 from Ian G3SEK         'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek