Something occurred to me recently that I thought I'd share... It has to do
with the Feds, the ARRL, BPL and ARESCOM / WL2K.

Note how the ARRL was getting some traction early on with the BPL deal by
taking a rational, scientific approach to the problem. Remember the video of
Ed Hare driving around listening to BPL hash? Being above commercial
concerns, amateur radio operators were in a good position to comment on
technical matters with no taint of commercial motivation or greed. We spoke
from an old, well-respected reputation.

Then things seemed to go wrong in a murky sort of way. - In the end, Ham
Radio was dissed by the FCC as not being relevant enough to protect from BPL
interference.

To me, this says that somebody within the federal government who wanted to
boost BPL decided to pull a few strings and ham radio obligingly tripped
over those strings.

I was thinking about how the federal government sometimes handles problems
and wondered if the Department of Homeland Security grants may have been a
successful "trojan horse" weapon that we are currently suffering the effects
of.

It strikes me funny that all within a year or so, the feds (DHS) would throw
millions of dollars at amateur radio through the DHS grants, and then the
same feds (FCC) turn around and say our work is so irrelevant that it does
not merit protection from inteference. To me, they are all "the feds"
because of the heirarchy of command there.

With its deep pockets, it seems to me that the DHS grants handed out were a
very cheap and effective way for the federal government to:

A: Eliminate the Amateur community's "detatched, objective" status by
throwing money at the problem, depending on us to discredit ourselves by the
way we react to the existence of that sudden influx of money.

B: Throw the ARRL and the amateur community into disarray, making the
organized, concerted effort against BPL that was building much less likely
to jell into something effective.

C: Produce a dependency upon the federal government that did not exist
before, bringing new, long-lived federal control over our activities that
previously did not exist.

We were starting to be a problem, so the federal government threw money at
us. Soon we were tainted with greed, discredited, dependent, disorganized
and fighting each other instead of BPL.

Cheap at any price, especially when you're spending somebody else's money to
start with, eh?


Charles Brabham, N5PVL