10 Comments
Commenting has been turned off for this post
Apr 7, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Steve, There seems to be a little more to this story and from what little I can gather, it's not as one sided as it may at first glance seem. I still don't think that the league's directors acted in a way that was consistent with forwarding the hobby. But there seem to be other allegations that may or may not shed some light on the politics of the Hudson Division, but I don't know if these were reactionary or if it was endemic to N2RJ's term as director. There was a change.org petition that was spawned from this incident or incidents. I myself don't really have a dog in the fight. But I'd love to know what the whole story is. Just throwing in my 2 cents, I think you steer clear of politics for good reason on this newsletter and it would probably be a good idea not to deviate from that initial feeling.

Expand full comment
founding
Apr 7, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Philadelphia Community Chat? Can you share your source or a public link? I'm in Philly. I belong to five local ham clubs and the local computer club and read all the email lists and this is the first I've heard of it. 73 de K3FZT / Steve

Expand full comment
Apr 7, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Another continent, same problems! I also have quite some problems with the politics within our German society DARC. For example I tried to bring to attention to the forces there are that our magazine is edited very badly. I have earned my money for more than 30 years with quite similar work, I exactly know what I am talking about. What happened was that I was forced to remove much of my criticism from my Web site. One thing is sure: cqDL, like QST, is the most important connection between the society and the members. If members think that only engineers can understand a large portion of the content and the rest is irrelevant anyhow, why should you remain a member? I just got my diploma for 50 years of membership in DARC. But there is primarily a single cause that keeps me there: We need representation in politics, creating of technical standards etc. This representation must have as many people behind it as possible. As I see it, ham radio in Germany is much less established as it might be in other countries.

Expand full comment
Apr 8, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Hi Steve – A correction: Don writes Digital Connection for CQ. I wrote Digital Dimension for QST many eons ago. – 73 DE WA1LOU

Expand full comment
Apr 10, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

About "technical standards": I did not think about AX.25 or other ham radio stuff. I talk about official industry standards, especially the EMC aspects of these.

For example Powerline (or how on your side of the pond the standard to transmit Ethernet signals over the power cabling of a house is called): Here in Germany the shortwave amateur bands must be notched, slightly reducing the capacity of these systems. DARC has a few very engaged people that often have spent much of their professional life with creating such standards. For example Powerline units sold in OE need not be notched.

There is a "round table amateur radio" where all bodies involved with administrative topics around our hobby meet. That starts with several ham radio societies, coordinated by DARC, and includes among others Bundesnetzagentur (our "FCC"), federal government and even German military. The military for example is extremely important for any advances on the 6m band as we are secondary users in the military band 47-68 MHz.

There are also examples what happens when the radio amateurs have no voice that is heard, especially in Scandinavia: In OZ, LA, SM and OH the 70cm amateur radio band is only 6 MHz wide, 432-438 MHz, which created a terrible mess: Relays must use a 1.6 MHz offset, sometimes up and sometimes down. They cannot help but operate relay uplinks in the ISM band!

In OH, two years ago the complete 23cm band disappeared, officially because of the Galileo navigation system. This could have been solved better: SW of Munich, in Oberpfaffenhofen, is one of the command stations for the Galileo system. We had to shut off a few 23cm relays in the Munich area, but otherwise still can use 1,2 GHz.

Do you understand why this is important to me?

Expand full comment