Allen,

 

First:  Congratulations on the tremendous press you gained for Amateur Radio.  When I view the great results you obtained relative to my limited knowledge of how you went about doing your job (so well), I can only conclude you are the best Public Information guru the League has had – ever!  I also congratulate Dave and others who were responsible for bringing you on board.

 

It may be a premature to work through the following; therefore, at your convenience and pending your personal recovery from Katrina, I’d like to speak with you about how we (the Amateur Radio Service) can get much greater PR assistance as a result of critical work we provide through “served agencies.”  It may be partly out of ignorance that I sense that we (the ARS) continue very deliberately to receive the royal shaft from the ANC and others who are too mentally-small and childish to be able to share that which should legitimately be shared.

 

This, of course, rankles me --- not merely because the ARS typically receives negligible or no billing.  Having worked very closely for many years with two such served agencies, I attribute this to their callous, selfish and myopic failure to recognize that their continued reluctance to point out the great good we do will ultimately lead to a dearth of skilled operators needed to carry out the very communication that allows them to perform their work.

 

I am unwilling to sit back and accept a priori that we have no viable options to pursue in rectifying this problem.  I am equally willing to accept that a mutually—acceptable, mutually-beneficial solution to this problem can be found.

 

I will appreciate it if you let me know of a couple of times during which I could telephone you to discuss this subject.  Obviously, your perspective is very important to understanding the situation.

 

Tnx, 73,

 

Jim

 

Jim Weaver, K8JE

Director, Great Lakes Division ARRL; http://www.arrl.org/

5065 Bethany Rd., Mason, OH 45040

Tel.:  513-459-0142; E-mail:  k8je@arrl.org

ARRL:  The reason Amateur Radio Is!

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