Phil Kane wrote:

The State of Oregon is putting out six figures to provide for a D-Star
EMCOMM network and a Pactor network. It's being pushed by several
folks who got either ICOM or the State or both to subsidize their
personal D-Star radios and/or are "blessed with resources" to get one
on their own. Not counting my HF rig, I have five radios for voice
comms: a VHF and a UHF in the home comm room, my mobile, my HT, and my
"grab-and-go". Who is going to subsidize that? I surely can't.

My perennial "what hath technology wrought" rant....



Unfortunately, it's how they think. One of my old chestnuts is that the
reason that Ham radio is often the only thing working when the wheels
fall off is that:

1.Our organization is ad-hoc. Lots of people who know how to
communicate, but are not within some strict hierarchy.

2.We have equipment that will talk to our equipment. Now sometimes that
means that we're using old school SSB or FM or CW. That's bad? No that's
good! The idea is to pass the message, not to sit in the seat and feel
really great about the whiz-bang technology we're using.

3.We know how to get the messages across. There is something to be said
about understanding propagation. Going to send a message on 20 meters to
someone 100 miles away? 40 meters at night? How about 50 miles away on
440 simplex? A little bit of knowledge is pretty handy.


Now what I see is the folk who would have us help when disaster strikes
have noted that we seem to pull rabbits out of our hat, and they like
what they see. But as people who impress a hierarchy, organization, and
levels of technology on everything they touch, now want to do the same
to us. After Katrina, I was kind of shocked by all the "This is what you
Amateurs Have To Do" articles and speeches. And each article had a
common thread - we amateurs had to become more like the people who
experienced failure. Just didn't make sense.

And yet they can't seem to figure out why their systems fail when it
all falls apart. My guess is that we will be looking at more technology
impressed on the system. And it will probably fail too.

- 73 de Mike N3LI -