On Aug 3, 3:44?pm, Michael Coslo wrote:
wrote:
On Jul 31, 2:52 pm, Michael Coslo wrote:
wrote:

I don't know if 'the folks who were all
about the robot stations' took
over the process or not. But that doesn't matter.

I disagree. I believe it matters very much.

See below about the very wise man you quoted.

What I do know is that there was a
widespread *perception* that RBB
was "all about robots" and conducted
behind closed doors. That
*perception* was pure poison when
comment-time came around. It
galvanized so many hams into writing
anti-RBB comments that the good
parts of the proposal were lost in the uproar.

A very wise man once told me that if
enough people have a perception of
something, it doesn't matter what the
truth is, the perception becomes
the truth. And as hard as that may be
to swallow, it is just how things are.

I would say that the perception is what drives people's actions, not
that the perception is the truth.

Most of all, what happens in those cases is
that the perception matters more than the truth.
That's what I meant by "It doesn't matter" whether
the folks who are all about robots took drove RBB
or not.

The really sad thing is that the BoD, who
OK'd the proposal, didn't
see all that ahead of time.

This is not an unusual thing.

Sad but true - in many things.

Many different groups see their own
interests as paramount to the "big picture"
in Ham radio (though it
isn't exclusive to the ARS)

It certainly isn't!

And the way you get around that sort
of resistance is to let all
groups have their say, and come up
with proposals that give everybody
something of what they want.

I've sat through lectures from Emergency
Operation fans on how amateur radio MUST
change to acommodate their
particular view. Pro contesters/anti contesters,
the different folks
involved all have a vision of what the service
needs to be.

Sure. And they're almost all right!
The trick is to make room for
everyone.

Actually I'm not so sure about
everyone being right.

Everyone isn't right. That's why I wrote
"almost".

My experience has
been that people who are intensely
interested in one thing or the other
don't believe that others needs are of sufficient interest.

Sometimes.

Which is why
it is important that any BOD is
interested in the big picture.

The trouble is that almost every specialized
interest will say *they* are the big picture!

For example, I think WinLink/Pactor/robots
are a great thing in
Amateur Radio. I think many of our rules
on them are outdated and in
need of rewriting. I even think the
"no-data-in-the-phone-bands" rule
has to go.

I think that the stations have to become
a whole lot better behaved
before they are allowed anywhere.

I'm not proposing that they be allowed everywhere.

The business of just opening up
whenever and wherever is bad stuff.

But at the same time, I do not think
that simply allowing robot
operation everywhere is a good thing.
That's why I opposed both RBB
and CTT.

As a person chased off the air (or at
least to another frequency) by
the machines, I couldn't agree more.
There has been a lot of discussion
re the PSK31 "segment", with a lot
of people telling us to "just move".
Yeah, I guess we could. The nature
of PSK31 is such that making it's
practitioners fly all over the band in
search of a free spot is a great
way to kill it. especially for those who
use the rockbound radios. A lot
of the PSK units are just a rockbound
transceiver tied to a laptop.

Which is the beauty of the mode: that it
can give such good results without an
elaborate setup.

Unless I am mistaken, a ham could take
an old computer that's useless for almost
everything else and get on PSK31 with it
and a radio that costs under $100.

It
got bad enough that at least in the
Digipan PSK software, the programmer
put in receive only for the robots so that
we could ID them and complain
to the F.C.C.

Has anyone done that? Such complaints
should also go to the ARRL BoD and the
committee that wrote RBB as well, IMHO

All that fuss over 1 3KHz piece of the band!

Yep.

It was a failure in my view because:

1) A lot of good ideas in RBB were beat down too
2) The beat-down of the bad ideas should have
happened *before* it was
ever sent to FCC, not after.
3) The proposal asked a lot of hams to give
something up, without
giving them anything in return, or not
enough in return. Meanwhile,
other hams would gain something without
giving anything up. Or at
least it seemed that way to many hams.

This is why proposals like RBB and CTT go
nowhere, IMHO.

And that is why I consider it a good thing.
I agree with you that ideas
should be tested out before submission.

I think the submission of proposals that
fail miserably damages the credibility
of the submitting organization. That's
particularly true if the organization says
they represent the amateur community, or
a large part of it. If an organization cannot
motivate its membership to produce a
large number of supporting comments, it
tells FCC that the organization doesn't
really know what its members want.

I really strongly believe that when
special interest subgroups get hold
of the process, they invariably subvert
it to their interest.

I disagree. But I do agree that it's
very possible for them to do so.

While
there may have been good ideas
in RBB, the bad ones were bad enough that
it was worth losing the whole thing.

I agree. But I think a proposal could
have been developed that kept the
good ideas and lost the bad ones.

Hopefully the BOD paid attention
to that fact.

Hopefully.

IMHO, one of the reasons it takes
*years* for FCC to make even simple
changes to Part 97 (like dumping the code
test) is because we USA hams
don't get our act together before
sending proposals to FCC.

Look at how Canada handled the code test thing.

We can do it also. At least in principle.

I hope so.

Practice will be a lot
harder, as I suspect that
we might be a little more of a contentious lot
than our VE brethren.

Maybe. But I think if US hams are approached
in a reasonable way, they will be reasonable.

73 de Jim, N2EY