RAC puts politics before purpose

Well I picked a good time to revisit my blog after a nearly 2-year hiatus...

Citing "increasingly strained" relations between the US and Canada and other issues completely unrelated to amateur radio, the RAC (Radio Amateurs of Canada) have "unanimously" agreed NOT to attend the Hamvention in Xenia for 2025.

I double-checked and sure enough, April Fool's Day was last Tuesday.

See for yourself below (complete statement with French translation here):

At its meeting on March 27, 2025, the Board of Directors of Radio Amateurs of Canada voted unanimously to cancel RAC’s plans to operate a booth at Hamvention (Dayton) in Xenia, Ohio in May. This decision was not taken lightly and was made with deep regret as our members and volunteers always look forward to attending this significant international event. 

The relationship between Canada and the United States has become increasingly strained due to recent trade disputes and tariffs imposed by the US government. Adding to these challenges, controversial remarks from US leaders, including suggestions of Canada becoming the 51st state, have heightened concerns about Canadian sovereignty. 

For Canadians, these tensions have had tangible impacts and there has been a decline in cross-border travel and tourism.

It is a complex and evolving situation, but it is our hope that we will be able to return to Hamvention in future years and we hope that Canadian Amateurs who do attend the event will have a safe and enjoyable experience. 

I scouted over their Objectives and nowhere do I find anything about boycotting hamfests across the border due to political ideologies of the board. The closest I find is this:

To represent Canadian Amateur Radio operators in policy decisions regarding international issues and regulation that affect Amateur Radio within the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and at meetings and conferences of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU).

To act as a liaison organization and consultative body to municipal, provincial and federal governments in matters concerning the Amateur Service and act as a liaison and consultative body to the Canadian Government and its appropriate departments.

The "controversial remarks" made by US leadership at no point is making a threat to Canadian amateur radio, its operators, or agencies. How exactly do these remarks affect spectrum? How do they endanger amateur radio operations for Canadians?

This is quite simply, the actions of a few overbearing hams with some delusions of grandeur trying to make it appear that their entire constituency is on a united front. That attitude doesn't always end well for those that attempt to wield their swords when not warranted or welcomed.

I'm thinking this will NOT be the end of the story. I expect there to be an attempt at a retraction in the forthcoming days should the membership protest this decision, and I would certainly hope the membership does protest en masse. The RAC says it speaks on behalf of ALL Canadian Amateurs so while I'm sure there are those who would support this decision, do they ALL feel this way? I feel it's unlikely a unified sentiment, and I would hope they raise their voices in chorus to say as much. And regarding the "unanimous" comment...I know from personal experience, that this decision is anything BUT unanimous. NOTHING is unanimous in ham radio, unless everyone has a like-minded mentality about the politics of things outside of ham radio, which I've never encountered. Most any radio club, big and small, has their factions when it comes to any kind of politics. You ask club members what time it is, about half will tell you how to build a watch, some will give it in 24-hour military time, and a few others will tell you to f*** off and look at your own damned phone. 

I made two trips to Canada last year, and neither time did I feel any strained relations between the US and our neighbors in the "51st state". My family and I felt nothing but appreciation, gratitude, and kindheartedness. I couldn't raise anyone on a repeater, but that's another story...

So congrats, RAC Board, you fell for the "51st state" comment by a President who loves trolling the weak-minded simpletons like yourselves. He stirred the pot yet again and you took it hook, line, and sinker. There is a snowball's chance in hell of any sort of annexation, either via force or via tariffs. But you want to use it as an excuse to get out of a commitment for spreading goodwill and friendship at the most important ham radio event of the year, because your feelings got hurt?

This is not about spectrum, nor about regulatory issues, and definitely not about operating skills and goodwill (other than to create some sense of animosity between Canadian and US hams). This is simply a group of people putting on a show to try and give an appearance of unity about a topic the organization has no real direct purpose for involving themselves. They have put personal politics ahead of the objectives and values of their organization. 

If...IF the RAC board change their mind (or the membership makes them change it), will the DARA folks even consider extending the invite back to the RAC for this year? Were they comped a table or did they have to pay for the privilege of having a table indoors? Are there deeper concerns for the stability and solvency of the RAC or is it truly grandstanding for a cause which not everyone may be in agreement?

I am curious to know how RAC members feel about this decision. Does it truly speak for them all? Does the RAC need to involve themselves in politics not related to ham radio in a direct (or even indirect) capacity?

STS-135 launch (and spaceflight thoughts)

The week of the 4th of July I was in Florida visiting family and looking to attempt to watch Atlantis lift off from the Cape on the final Shuttle flight.

Two things:

1) I will NEVER drive through Orlando ever again if I can help it, and

2) It's sad that we will never have this opportunity to see such awesomeness ever again.

We were staying in Daytona Beach for a couple of days (we didn't dare try Cocoa Beach or Titusville) and I took the family down as well as my mother. We went mainly because she'd never seen a launch and wanted to catch it before NASA ended the shuttle program. Ironically, the day of the launch she felt ill and didn't want to make the trip down from Daytona. We arrived from Ft. Myers the day before and were pretty exhausted from the drive after suffering through Orlando during rush hour with a monsoonal rain to add to the misery. Two hours and 3 "alternate routes" through Orlando, and we arrived in Daytona about ready to stay without making an attempt to go to the Cape area.

And to boot, it was questionable whether they'd launch because of weather. a 30% chance of a launch was not good odds, but something told me that, with close to a million people watching around the space coast, I began to wonder if they'd forego some restrictions in order to finish up the program. With the shuttle program already a year behind on its scheduled shutdown, I thought for certain that they would be under pressure to finish while maintaining an acceptable limit of safety. After all, the last two times that NASA got complacent we lost two shuttles and 14 astronauts.

I didn't decide to make the trek south until about 2 hours until liftoff. We got on the road south on I-95 and I took an exit just north of Titusville. My plan was to simply get on the outskirts of the crowds, yet stay close enough to actually see the liftoff.

We rode US 1 to the Titusville city limit and checked the GPS for any nearby parks. But on the way we started seeing cars on the side of the road, so we figured the park was jammed.

As I turned around and went north, I spotted a parking lot near the hospital that was occupied with people watching the launch, but looked to have a few spaces left. When we got parked we had 30 minutes before liftoff. We walked around the area and then got back to the car and set up the camera.

As we got closer to the T-0, we could feel the anticipation grow. Then at 31 seconds, there was a halt due to a problem with the fuel arm that loads the liquid propellants into the external tank. We thought that was going to blow the launch for the day, but they were able to quickly resume the count after confirming that the arm was fully retracted. When the count hit zero, we waited for about 8-10 seconds before we saw it rise from the treeline and head into space.

Unfortunately the low clouds made it viewable for only 10-15 seconds before we lost it to cloud cover. We were a lot closer to the launch site than I thought, as we were looking towards an area further south than we actually were. The shuttle appeared further to our east and closer than I imagined. I had my video camera pointed to the southeast, but when I grabbed it to look east, I bumped the on/off button for the recording. When I looked at it later, all you see is a still shot of the view southeast, then a cut to the smoke trail heading off into the clouds. Fortunately my brother loaned us his digital camera as well as the video camera, so I managed to get off one good shot before it got into the clouds.

Almost immediately I grabbed the tripod and equipment and got into the car, the delayed sound of the shuttles SRBs roaring to life wafting over the crowd as we quickly made our way back to Daytona Beach. We got back to our room before 1PM. After being stuck in Orlando traffic, I was glad we didn't need to suffer through space coast traffic the day after.

As we drove back to Daytona, I then had the time to really ponder what we had witnessed and the impact on our future as a space power.

I'm not wanting to drag politics into the post, but you have to wonder why, after we built the majority of the International Space Station, and we footed most of the billions needed to put it in orbit, we now have to hitchhike with our partners in Russia, and then shell out millions for the rides. I'm curious how much money Russia paid NASA in order to ferry some of their cosmonauts on the shuttle.

Still, $56 million per person is a lot cheaper than what it would cost to launch another shuttle.

The reality is that the Space Shuttle, while cool, and an amazing display of American ingenuity technology and power, is almost 40 years old. It boggles my mind how stagnant the manned spaceflight program has been. In roughly 15 years, we went from Mercury, to Gemini, Apollo, then the Shuttle. Mercury was started in 1959. The shuttle program's origins go back to around 1969 as we landed on the moon. But from there, we have not launched anything other than the shuttles since 1981.

The shuttle was designed to make spaceflight "normal", and cheaper, more efficient, and almost as commonplace as getting on an airplane and flying from New York to London. And while the shuttle has made spaceflight a more achievable plateau than it was in the 60's, we have a long way to go before it's a mode of transportation that is as commonplace as air travel.

With the manned spaceflight program in full gear in the 60's to get to the moon, it would have appeared the the Space Shuttle was going to follow the same route, with Columbia being a "Generation 1" shuttle, and later shuttles being bigger, more advanced, and in some ways cosmetically different from one another. Other than subtle technology advances that made OV-105 (Endeavour) lighter than OV-102 (Columbia), there was no real change in the orbiters as far as concept, aerodynamic shape, etc.

I was hoping by now we'd have a shuttle with something like 9 main engines, a double-wide cargo bay, launched on a stack with 6 SRBs and a huge external tank 3x the size of the one the current fleet used. We never got to that point. I am sure THAT would have been impressive...

So now where does manned spaceflight go? We have a space station we can't get to, unless we hitch a ride with the Russians, and the only sign we're going to get back to a domestic manned program is either private industries like SpaceX or Congress appropriating more money towards the ARES program, using capsules to get into orbit rather than shuttles. And capsules seems rather regressive to me.

How close are we to losing 440?

If you've been paying attention to some of the news items this week, legislation is now introduced (by Pete King of New York) that would force amateur radio operators to give up the popular 70cm (440MHz) band by selling the spectrum off to commercial interests that would offset lost revenue from reallocating first responders' frequencies in order to streamline communications. This comes in light of a review by the 9/11 Commission which recommended a more integrated network of communicating with the different agencies to prevent the communications issues that arose during the attacks on September 11, 2001.

The frequencies given to the first responders is the freed up spectrum from the conversion of TV from analog to digital.

Bill HR 607 has now been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which handles telecommunications legislation. It's one of the beginning steps that is taken to get an act passed through into law. A long ways to go, but when it comes to raising money through a bake sale method, Congress finds ways to move it through in expedited fashion.

There are a couple of obstacles that could get in the way, in the form of two members of Congress who are hams. One is Greg Walden, W7EQI, who made headlines in December when he tweeted in morse code on Twitter that he was going to chair the House Communications Subcommittee. This may be the biggest ally ham radio has, and he's in a powerful position to force the bill back in to revision.

The other congressional ham operator is Representative Mike Ross, WD5DVR of Arkansas. He is a Democrat (Walden is Republican) so the potential for getting support of the opposition of this Bill in its present form on both sides of the aisle is greater.

Another potential ally is Congressman Billy Long of Missouri, who co-sponsored the Bill. He's gone on record in USA Today stating he's willing to come to an amicable solution to ensure that neither the first responders or hams are affected by this spectrum selloff, so we need to hold him to that promise.

The ARRL has a video on the bill.

I can understand the need to raise "bail money" considering the debt we're getting ourselves into, but doing so at the cost of one the best resources for emergency communications is a grave misstep. Besides, there's some spectrum down in the 220 band that was sold off awhile back and look how that turned out. Why not give that to the first responders? Or give it back to the amateur operators who would use it more than it's being used now.

5 tips for reducing radio club in-fighting, or why I don't belong to any local radio clubs

I've not been a club person for many years. In fact, I've steered away from clubs over the last several years because of one thing: politics. In fact, of the last 6 clubs I've been a member of:

• I quit one in protest over an issue with the state ARES coordinator wanting to change policy demanding the requiring of training that cost money
• I quit another in protest over a Field Day occurrence
• I was thrown out of another club (who claimed I was never a member) after I tried to help organize Field Day activities that were not supposed to be club related, yet the President of the club decided he was going to make it a club event and sent me an email (and CC'ed everyone in the club) telling them that I was not a member and would do the world a favor if I went away
  
• One club was dissolved after the membership dropped sharply
  
• Two clubs simply went dormant due to lack of participation

Almost all of these clubs had one low common denominator: Politics.

I have been dabbling in various hobbies, clubs, and activities of all sorts and never have I seen more political mudslinging, underhandedness, and general douchebaggery than I have in an amateur radio club.

I realize not everyone's going to get along when it comes to being in a large club, but seriously, what do you have to gain from stealing someone else's thunder or makes them look bad? No one gets paid to be a club president (that I know of) and the only perk I've seen from it is that on maybe one occasion you might get thrust into the TV news' camera lenses and maybe some newsprint, and who cares who that person is, unless you're a glory hound (like some people I unfortunately know). I've been interviewed a couple of times for news stories, and it's not that spectacular, believe me. In fact I'm surprised my interview didn't end up a YouTube viral video.

KE5UTN wrote an interesting article on his blog about steps for reducing the politics of conflicts within an amateur radio club. It makes for recommended reading, especially for some of the clubs I've been associated with around here. Maybe more people would actually attend of some of these golden rules were abide by (I especially like #3).

And seriously, whoever "Robert" is, his rules of order suck!

Mt. Pleasant, WI is not kind to ham radio

If you're a ham operator, or the father of one, and you or a member of your family have special needs, stay away from Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin.

The town's planning commission ordered that a tower belonging to the Markstrom family was to be taken down after it was determined that the Markstroms did not secure the proper permits to erect it.

But it's not so much the planning commission, as it is the neighbors who all of a sudden claim that the tower's interfering with their TVs. The complaints were brought on after Jim (KB9MMA) and his son Samm (KC9POP) had their community service during severe weather attract unwanted attention by local officials and neighbors. Samm is 10 and has issues with Cerebral Palsy.

Granted, I don't live there, and I'm certainly biased when it comes to ham radio towers and the right to have one (I will NEVER live in an HOA thanks to their micro-plutocracies that base their "laws" on the almighty $$$ at the expense of individuality and the freedom of expression) but when the neighbors call a ten-year old a "media puppet" and are indifferent to the public service he's been awarded, the negative attention given to the neighbors is warranted in my opinion.

It looks like several media outlets have reported the story and there's even a facebook page dedicated to the cause.

However, now that the commission has spoken, it looks to be a lost cause. Jim has said he may sue to keep the tower, but at this point, why bother? Get the hell out of there, and move to a place that has wide open spaces, and welcomes the community service that Samm employs in order to get out of his shell that his disability has encased him.

And if Mt. Pleasant, God forbid, gets hit with a tornado, I would certainly hope they have ample warning. They would, if they'd allow one ham and his son to keep their tower.