On Monday, August 18, 2014 2:45:35 PM UTC-5, Phil Kane wrote:

I would never advise a client to knowingly violate a law or breach a
contract obligation on the basis "they'll never know the difference".

No smart lawyer would tell his client that it was OK to proceed to
violate the terms of a contract. If I was advising somebody, I would
say the same as you and add that they might want to get legal advice
from an attorney before doing anything rash.


Whether such law or
provision is "reasonable" or not is a different matter.


In this case, I don't think my "it's unreasonable" claim
would carry much weight. If we got to the imposition of a fine
stage for this, I'd be unlikely to prevail in court. I know that.


One thing to consider about whether "they" will catch you or not - it
depends on how much money the HOA wants to invest up front (they can
recover the costs of enforcement after litigation) and the companion
reason - depends on how bad they want to get you.

The process the HOA usually goes though is to 1. send a warning letter
giving me 30 days to "fix" any problems. 2. Sending the "official"
notice that they intend to fine me, setting the "final" deadline.
3. Then, they can start assessment of fines and/or fix the problem
themselves at my expense. All this costs them $$ up front as the
management company bills them at each stage.

My general plan is to comply with all warnings I receive within the
specified time. To this end, my current plan is to put up antennas I
don't mind taking down and doing my best to not draw too much
attention to what I'm doing. This means using "natural" supports
(trees, house, fences etc) to hold up some cheap wire and trying to
keep things out of sight as much as I can.

Where I am knowingly violating the terms of the CC&R's (BTW something
that is open to some debate as the Antenna policy is not in the
deed restrictions directly, but in a separate Architectural document
which has not actually been attached to my deed) I am not taking much
of a risk, unless they decide to abandon their standard process for me
and go straight to imposing fines without first requesting that I
comply.

Firms like ours and
our competitors are in the business of determining whether antennas
are active and on what frequencies. With modern technology there is
little need for the extended "stakeouts" of yore.


I'd like to hear about the equipment used for what used to take a
physical presence to figure out.