"Brian O" ) writes:

Well, what in hell does "wrong" mean to you, if not immoral or
unethical?

Its not unethical or immoral to charge whatever someone wants to charge for
a service. They can charge what they want to. You have the choice to pay
or operate illegally.

Actually, the choice can include "finding alternatives". And that's what
blows his justification up.

He has a ham license, yet that's no good for reasons he's bound to
come up with. He could use FRS walkie talkies, an allocation for people
who need some communication capability but don't want to pay a license
fee, and are willing to share with the masses. He can use CB, that
was intended for this sort of thing, and no longer even has a license.
He can use field telephones, complete with the roll of wire. He
can use semaphore, or blinkers. He can write the message down, and
either pass it on later, or use a messenger to deliver it. Undoubtedly
he has all kinds of reasons why none of them work. The problem is, that
once he starts judging that way, it's easy to say "well somewhere in the
aero band would be perfect, I think I'll use that".

And that completely ignores the issue of the ultimate importance
of all this. Obviously if someone is an emergency situation, then
just about anything goes. But, they'd better be careful that they
actually have properly judged the emergency to warrant the use, because
if they think it's okay to use police freqencies to call for someone
to come and repair a flat tire, they'd likely judge wrong. One alone
may not impact on emergency communicaiton, but once everyone starts
doing it, that ruins the frequency.

Even if there were no alternative communcation methods available,
the justification of breaking the law would depend on how important
this is. "But I want to" isn't justification.

Don't be fooled by his references to "civil disobedience". Because
that's about changing things, and all he's doing is conveniencing
himself.

ANd the joke is, since he claims to have a ham license, is that there
have been cases of people losing their ham licenses because they had
disregard for rules in the other services. THe FCC may decide that
if he shows such bad interpretation of the rules with GMRS, then
he can't be trusted with a ham license.


Michael