Oh yes, pull the other one. If anyone wants to send me a new shack I'll
promise to send a post card. Emergency work should be left to professionals
paid to do the job. They can quite often do without people getting under
their feet and in the way! There is an amateur/CB group in the UK that
causes a bit of annoyance like that, people must just like dressing up as
pretend police men. The public take absolutely no notice, and
amateurs/CBers don't either.

I'm sorry your situation is so poor over there. Believe me, it
doesn't have to be that way. It's possible to train the amateur
operators properly (so they know how to provide useful communications,
and how _not_ to get in the way and make things worse), and set up
official well-understood arrangements by which amateurs can provide
useful-and-sometimes-critical backup communications. This role as
emergency communicators is, in fact, a big part of the legal
justification for amateur radio as written into U.S. law.

In my own city, the amateur emergency-communication group is
affiliated with the city fire department - most of us are sworn in as
volunteers with the FD, and have had background checks run and photo
IDs issued. The ARES/RACES radio shack is in the Police & Fire
administration building, we've got perhaps a half-dozen antennas up on
their towers, the city provides a substantial budget for the purchase
and upkeep of amateur radios and the necessary equipment and antennas,
we have amateur-radio antennas pre-staged on all of the city fire
stations and at the hospitals, and have a good working relationship
with the city emergency services manager. We run drills every
quarter, have training classes once a month, and encourage amateurs to
become involved with their community CERT groups (for which the city
provides free emergency-response training classes). A lot of other
cities do as much, or more.

In an emergency (e.g. earthquake, a big issue around here!) it's very
likely that the number of trained amateur-radio communicators our
group can activate will exceed the total number of police officers and
firemen. We might even double their number - a lot of the public
safety officers live an hour's drive or more outside the city and may
not be able to get to work for _days_ after an earthquake.

I can't say that I particularly care for the monthly "please send us
your equipment" capital-letters boilerplate posting you're responding
to... but the poster's motives and justifications are not as suspect
as you seem to feel, I think.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!