In article , Leo
writes:
On 11 Feb 2004 00:00:18 GMT, (N2EY) wrote:
In article , Leo
writes:
On 10 Feb 2004 09:52:50 -0800, (N2EY) wrote:
Without the ARRL, do you think we'd still have amateur radio? I don't.
Um, the rest of the planet does not have the ARRL, and amateur radio
is still going strong there.....
In large part that's because of US influence at the international level.
Also the IARU, which was founded by guess who?
Perhaps, but are there specific historical facts which support that
theory?
Yep. Maxim, Mrs. Maxim (she spoke fluent French, the language used in the
conferences back then) Ken Warner and several other ARRL folks went to the
Paris conferences of 1924, 1925 and 1927 to push for the very existence of
amateur radio. Amateur radio did not actually exist by international treaty
until 1927 - hams were simply a subset of various countries' nongovernment
radio services.
The ARRL was a founding member of IARU - not the only founding
member....
True - but it was an ARRL idea.
Except for Japanese 4th class licensees, how many hams are there in the rest
of the planet?
Well, my trusty EuroCall 2003 CD lists 276,446 callsigns in Europe
alone - even if a couple of guys died, there's probably more than that
now. I don't have figures for Asia, Africa, Oceania or the rest of
the Americas (except that there's around 56,000 or so up here...).
Once you get outside of Europe, North America, the British Commonwealth and
Japan, there aren't many of us. China has more than a billion people - and how
many hams? A few thousand, maybe.
Quite a few, anyway! DX wouldn't be the same without 'em..... 
That's a lot of real estate, covering some 150 or so countries, give
or take a few....
Right. And there are 682,000 US hams, which is more than twice as many as in
all of densely populated Europe.
You might want to check out what the rest of the world wanted to do to
amateur radio in the 1920s at the Paris conferences....
Would you have a link handy for that one?
No, but do a search for W2XOY's "Wayback Machine".
And, did the ARRL actually exert that much influence over the other
members? As there is one IARU zone for each ITU zone, I'd expect that
they would have infinitely more say in the Zone 2 group than the
others...they may have been founders of the IARU in 1925, but they
didn't own it - did they?
ARRL organized IARU. The zone thing came later.
73 de Jim, N2EY
73, Leo