Chris,

Obviously, you have a much better view of the situation than me, but I have been feeling the same way about the Commissioners having a feeling of impending disaster.

The media gave a fair amount of publicity to the visit the day or two before Martin arrived. Nothing like a blitz, though. Incidentally, the meeting was held in a declining area of the city. I wouldn’t call it a poor area, but it is probably in about the lower third of the local income scale

Jim.

Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director

ARRL Great Lakes Division

5065 Bethany Rd.

Mason, OH 45040

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

ARRL - The Reason Amateur Radio Is!

Members - The Reason ARRL Is!

From: w3kd@aol.com [mailto:w3kd@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:27 AM
To: arrl-odv
Cc: apitts@arrl.org
Subject: Re: Chairman Martin's Visit -- further

Jim, my take on the DTV conversion is that Martin is looking an impending disaster in the face, and he and the other Commissioners are making a lot of public displays now (just a bit late, eh?) to try to look like they are doing everything they can to try to make this work. They pressed us into service as volunteers, but now they have just released a list of groups that they are giving lots of money to (including AARP) to disseminate information about the DTV conversion to people who are going to have trouble with this: elderly and low-income people especially, who might be expected to have over the air TV and who will need converters.

The Martin trip was just one in a long series of these field trips for Commissioners. The attendance is not surprising, since the publicity attached to his field trip is not too high. I assume this was not in any low income area, by the way.
Chris W3KD

Christopher D. Imlay
BOOTH, FRERET, IMLAY & TEPPER, P.C.
14356 Cape May Road
Silver Spring, Maryland 20904-6011
(301) 384-5525 telephone
(301) 384-6384 facsimile
W3KD@ARRL.ORG

-----Original Message-----
From: K8JE <K8JE@ARRL.org>
To: arrl-odv <arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org>
Sent: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 1:28 am
Subject: Chairman Martin's Visit -- further

I now understand the reason there were no panoramic shots by the media of the audience at Chairman Martin’s town meeting in Cincinnati. The attendance at the meeting was characterized on the late news this evening (last evening) as being from 35-40. Hardly an impressive number from the positive viewpoint.

Jim