In this episode from The YouTubers Bunch, we discuss Howard Michel, WB2ITX, the short-term CEO of the ARRL and how a change is leadership can affect the ARRL and Amateur Radio as a whole.
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I listened to the entire podcast, great topic and great bunch of guys to add comments. A few thoughts:
The ARRL principals are based upon the days of spark gap, replaying messages, and that mind set has not changed. They also are thinking radio as the medium for dissemination of information. I do understand internet and love the idea of using that medium to let the membership know what’s going on. This will require more than a few changes to the by-laws but rather a revamp of the entire organization. Before we go down that road, I believe we must have the conversation of what are we? From a organizational point of view, they are going to capital hill on a very regular basis and have to present a unified stance on a given subject. If there is a lot of decent and bickering within the public eyes, they cannot do what we elect them to do. So, to a certain extent, as an organization airing dirty launder defeats their mission: to represent us on legal and regulatory matters.
We must remember we ARE NOT a hobby; we are a licensed radio service. We to the eyes of government are a “trained group of radio operators, scientists of the radio art, entrepreneurs of the radio world, innovators, ambassadors and emergency radio operators. They do not see any Hobby in there, many of us view this as one great big play area, where we get to do what we want, when we want to it and have no responsibility to anyone. On the other hand we are granted privileges that many just do not have, so we in order to retain that must present ourselves ae a “professional” organization.
In order to communicate that a lot of what goes on behind the scenes is dirty laundry that the world dos not need to see, having said that: the ARRL must do a better job using todays tools to communicate what they are doing and why. At the same time, they also must be carful to not lo0ok like a bunch of figureheads. I would like to see changes, but I think we need to be care as to how much change we want and the consequences of those changes.
Ron Henry
KB9ZB member arrl