Thank you, Dick!! 73 de Gary KI4LA Sent from Gary's 3G iPhone On May 29, 2009, at 12:24 AM, "Richard J. Norton" <richardjnorton@gmail.com
wrote:
At Dayton I helped Jim Weaver, K8JE, and his team at the ARRL Legislative Action booth. Noticed that they were manually editing letters to congressional representatives requesting support of H.R. 2160. The letters were expected to be eventually delivered to the representatives by our lobbyist, Chwat and Company
This appeared to be a task that could be automated and also a task that a volunteer might implement.
I approached my friend and long-time ARRL volunteer Trey Garlough, N5KO, with the problem. Trey is the driving force behind eham.com and contesting.com . He also assists the ARRL contest program with log collection.
After a day or so of effort Trey produced the automated routine at
http://www.kkn.net/cgi-bin/rjnorton.pl
Just enter a callsign and the site determines the correct congressional representative and essentially instantaneously produces a letter. You are welcome to use the capability to produce letters at events you find appropriate.
The routine is slightly fragile in that if any of the web-sites used to find the information fail, or change the format in which they present data, the routines may not work. This is not expected, but possible.
I suspect that we could have produced thousands of letters at Dayton if we had the capability available.
RELATED DAYTON OBSERVATIONS
I'm not suggesting that this letter writing campaign strikes me as insuring success of our legislative program. However, I noticed two things at Dayton.
1) I could approach anybody that passed by the booth and ask if they would sign a letter to their congressman. 100 percent of them agreed, and all seemed favorably impressed.
2) Just by the members seeing this operation, a number of them now view the ARRL in a slightly different light. Maybe the League isn't only a subscription to QST.
For reason 2 alone, I thought the activity to be beneficial.
73,
Dick Norton, N6AA