Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9   Go Down

Author Topic: VKØLD/VK6CQ suggests ARRL revoke 3Y0J DXCC Credit for Endangering Life & Limb  (Read 2991 times)

VK6CQ

  • Posts: 31
    • HomeURL

Quote
I wonder if release clauses were signed,

I don't understand this argument.  This isn't about private parties and covenants not to sue.

This is about whether certain government agencies are responsible for certain patches of ocean and are obligated under some law or treaty or other to mount a rescue when a rescue is required.



I believe my concerns regarding Antarctic & sub-Antarctic DXpedition safety are now sufficiently out there in the public domain for the 'powers that be' to take notice and take action, so I will not be posting any further comments regarding the matter on eHam.net DX forum. Anyone wanting to ask any further sensible questions is free to contact me at: vk0ld@yahoo.com

73 to all, Alan VK6CQ / VKØLD
Logged

KC0W

  • Member
  • Posts: 1542

 Wow, that was a lot of drama..............Who is going to be the first one to poke the bear trying to get VK6CQ to come out of hibernation?  :)

 
Logged

KB2FCV

  • Member
  • Posts: 3285
    • homeURL

Wow, that was a lot of drama..............Who is going to be the first one to poke the bear trying to get VK6CQ to come out of hibernation?  :)


Tom, if you were in hibernation... would we have to tip the cow instead of poke the bear? Asking for a friend..  ;D
Logged

W1VT

  • Member
  • Posts: 6071

The ARRL offers 100 bonus points for Class A Field Day Stations that have a Safety Officer.
Logged

WB3BEL

  • Member
  • Posts: 209

I will say that I think the ARRL has no place in judging the safety of amateur radio operations.

They do not have anyone who has the expertise to make these kinds of judgments.
I am sure that they would not like the legal implications of being in this position.
They are a publishing house  and radio club among other things. 

I don't like the thought of people who were not there, but who have seen some video or read some stories on the internet making after the fact criticisms.  Perhaps there are some who are qualified, but I am not convinced.  I think that the people who were actually there have their own ideas about what was good and what was not so good about their operation.

This reminds me of a picture I have in my head about the Explorers Club in it's heyday.   A lot of gents sitting with a whisky in hand intoning...   Bad Form I say.  Very Bad Form...  Kibitzing about some expedition to the ends of the globe that did something that was not tradition.

« Last Edit: March 05, 2023, 08:53:20 AM by WB3BEL »
Logged

W9AC

  • Member
  • Posts: 373

Bottom line is, people should be allowed to place themselves at risk - even in danger, if they chose.

We all take risks, some calculated better than others.  Just a few of mine within the last year:

Getting behind the wheel of an automobile;
Crossing a busy highway intersection;
Downhill skiing on a slope beyond my skill level;
Walking alone in New York City's Central Park;
Walking alone at night to get to Chicago's Greektown on Halstead Avenue;
Neglecting to take my glaucoma medication;
Getting near a 12 ft Alligator at my Okefenokee Swamp remote site.

Some of those decisions were more reckless than a Bouvet landing. 

Quote
No, I didn't work them.

I did work them.

Paul, W9AC
Logged

VK3OD

  • Member
  • Posts: 7

 “Mountains are only a problem when they are bigger than you. You should develop yourself so much that you become bigger than the mountains you face.”

Man would not have landed on moon if man looked for excuses to give up!
Logged

WO7R

  • Member
  • Posts: 6042

Quote
Bottom line is, people should be allowed to place themselves at risk - even in danger, if they chose.

I can't agree with this attitude.  I agree adults should be adults, we agree that far, but that's not really the discussion here. 

We are not innocent bystanders.  The risks they took were taken because of arbitrary rules we all agreed to follow.  And which we, the stay at homes, insist upon.  If we wanted a different DXCC, and organized ourselves adequately, we could get it.  Based on any grounds whatever.

So, we dangle the risks and rewards out there for others to take.  There are plenty of Godforsaken Rocks that nobody goes to because, for whatever arcane reason, they don't count separately and there are much safer options.  DXpeditioners are not intrinsically motivated by risk. When was the last time Everest or K2 was activated for SOTA?

We have already, as I have pointed out, long special cased Western Sahara and Spratley.  I don't know if they quite qualify without that special, explicit permission.  In any case, we specifically included them.

Well, we could specifically exclude entities as well.  There's nothing magic about the list we have.  "The rules" have been changed many times.  Maybe it's past time to consider whether we want to get practical about safety. . .or at least expense.

We, collectively, have a finite budget for DXing and DXpeditions.  We particularly have a limited budget for big time expeditions like Bouvet.  One, maybe two a year.  Tops.

I know there's a lot of people out there that, because it's a hobby, resist thinking about this stuff.

But, we just spent something like 2.5 million dollars over three expeditions to get 20,000 QSOs out of Bouvet.  Some of us contributed up-front, many of us did not.  But, the ones that contribute up front are the ones that make these expeditions possible.  The boat is paid for before it leaves the dock, among other things paid up front.

The DXpeditioners themselves put up a big fraction (40, 50 per cent of the budget), but we, individually and through foundations, put up the rest.   Whether you contribute or not that is financial reality. The budget just isn't unlimited.

And, despite big individual budgets, it is not clear to me, anymore, that we are spending enough to actually reliably pull these things off.  Costs keep rising, too.  It wasn't that long ago that 350K US could activate anything.  Not anymore.  Million dollar expeditions are becoming commonplace.  And, as we've seen, these are not gold plated exercises.   3Y0J barely happened.  The other two got us zero Qs.

Do we want to keep hitting our head against the wall for some of these places?  We could have had four, five, six activations to some still very rare but still difficult places for that kind of money.

Maybe the program is healthier in all respects if we look at some of these places and make the practical decision that we just don't have the wherewithal to activate them safely and for a price we really want to pay.
Logged

WO7R

  • Member
  • Posts: 6042

Quote
Man would not have landed on moon if man looked for excuses to give up!

"Man" also had an effectively unlimited budget and shut the program down cold when Apollo One caught fire.  The redesigned the command module and lunar lander because of it.  Think we are up for anything remotely equivalent?

The Soviets had no prayer of getting to the moon.  How do I know?  There was a remarkable interview Nova did after the Soviet collapse with all the top surviving Russian management (they were still alive then).

The head of it all was asked, point blank, whether they could catch up with the US.

"Nyet" I heard, firmly and definitely, before the translator began translating the rest of the answer.  He then detailed exactly how badly they were being outspent and how many corners they were cutting.  They were under enormous pressure to succeed, but they just didn't have the horses.

It takes more than will to do these things and even more will to do them without excessive risk.  In fact, I gathered from that interview that sometimes taking risks means you haven't really got it.  Not reliably.  "Luck" is not a program.

The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, died trying to operate the Soviet would-be lunar lander.  That was one we didn't find out about until this same program.
Logged

ZS1DX

  • Member
  • Posts: 14

Sour grapes are on the menus for hams who did not work 3Y0J?  ;)

DXpeditioners decide what is "safe" for themselves, like all adults should.

Scaredy-cats best stay at home, safely behind their keyboards, microphones and keys.

Logged

WO7R

  • Member
  • Posts: 6042

Quote
Scaredy-cats best stay at home, safely behind their keyboards, microphones and keys.

How bravely you cheer on the risks that other people take based on rules you assent to.

I'd bet some here would make the very same posts even if a requirement for activating certain DXCCs, right in our rule book, required them to walk a half mile over hot coals.  "They are adults, they can take whatever risks they want."  That would be the inevitable posts.

At some point, we certainly must let adults take risks.  But we should also stop this eternal pretending that the number and degree of these risks are something we stay at homes have nothing to do with.

We have everything to do with it.
Logged

W2IRT

  • Member
  • Posts: 4229
    • What I do for fun

Quote
Scaredy-cats best stay at home, safely behind their keyboards, microphones and keys.
How bravely you cheer on the risks that other people take based on rules you assent to.
...
I'd bet some here would make the very same posts even if a requirement for activating certain DXCCs, right in our rule book, required them to walk a half mile over hot coals.  "They are adults, they can take whatever risks they want."  That would be the inevitable posts.
If that was the requirement and there was no nanny to tell them no, then it is up to the DXpeditioners to make the call. Nobody else. Period. There would have been no Shackelton, no Hillary, and many other famous explorers if today's pearl-clutchers had held sway back in the day when men weren't afraid to do dangerous things.
Logged
www.facebook.com/W2IRT
Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until I reach Top of the Honor Roll

Great times are at hand, and soon there will be DX for all—although more for some than for others.

WO7R

  • Member
  • Posts: 6042

Quote
If that was the requirement and there was no nanny to tell them no, then it is up to the DXpeditioners to make the call. Nobody else. Period. There would have been no Shackelton, no Hillary, and many other famous explorers if today's pearl-clutchers had held sway back in the day when men weren't afraid to do dangerous things.

Shacketon and Hillary were doing stuff with intrinsic value.  Real life explorations of this world.

They were not doing it to satisfy the arbitrary rule set for an arcane hobby.  It is silly, frankly, to compare the two.

I have not objected to DXpeditioners taking these risks.  I have objected to the idea that we pretend we are magically exempt from establishing the risks they do take and have no responsibility for them as they are.

It is their call whether to go or not.  Never said otherwise.  But, I do say that it is our call whether there is any reason to go in the first place.  It isn't "pearl clutching".  It's owning up to our part of this.

We should not, in any sense, pretend we are bystanders.  Too many of these posts do so, implicitly or otherwise. 

"How risky this is" is not really set by the DXpeditioners.  We set those risks and we do it with a rule set blessed by nothing save history and our own ornery sense that it's always 1959 and nothing has changed.  It may even be, in some cases, that we have no empathy and don't give a damn about what risks people take for an arbitrary game.

There is a regular research team on Bouvet, supported by the Norwegian government.  It's not like there's this wonderful value to science and humanity for a DXpedition to go to Bouvet.  It's literally just to play radio for us.

If some future group dies activating some of these places, because it is inherently risky, or the risk has gone up for some reason, then we all bear a certain amount of responsibility because there is zero value to Bouvet or Peter I for radio amateurs unless we have a rule set that makes it valuable.  Well, what we make, we can unmake.
Logged

AF5CC

  • Posts: 1664
    • HomeURL

For those who were around then, what was DXing like in the 50s and 60s?  I get the impression that DXers were much less concerned with ultimate count and DXpeditions to every entity.  It was more of a, I will work what is on the air, kind of mindset.  Maybe it was less competitive back then, or without the internet it was harder to keep score and always discuss such things.

I know we didn't have mega-DXpeditions back then.

73 John AF5CC
Logged

WO7R

  • Member
  • Posts: 6042

I wasn't there, but I believe part of it was that some of the harder places hadn't been activated yet.

We had people like Don Miller and the Colvins basically dropping anchor somewhere and operating.

Environmental restrictions didn't exist.  There are tales of activating places like Navassa or Deschero with a rickety rope ladder long used by casual expeditioners and the locals for their beer busts.  As far as I know, those tales are true.

A lot of what we take for granted was all added along the way -- CW Honor Roll, DXCC Challenge, etc. was all added as the years went by (and when computers made it practical to have a complex tracking of all of these achievements).  I have no idea when all of these were added, but I do know that they were, over time.

Before the Don Miller scandal (the guy who did things like invent split operation but then got lazy and didn't operate from all the places he said he did), "the rules" were a lot fewer and simpler.  Nobody had to document anything back then.

KY6R produced (or promoted?) this great chart that lays it all out.  For a lot of reasons, including "nobody went there yet" the list" was a lot smaller for a lot of years.

It was also, as some reminiscence I once read said, the age of the traffic handler and the brass pounder.  DXing was not so dominant as an activity then.

Here's that chart in PDF form:

http://ebarc.org/pdf/dx-entity-history.pdf   . . . and it includes some of the award additions as well as estimates of how big the Honor Roll was at various times.

One important date not on that chart was the creation of DXCC Challenge in the year 2000 or so.

I remember when I was starting out in the late '80s, it was still possible and popular to buy radios that did not have WARC band capabilities.  My first two or three HF rigs didn't have it.

Until the Challenge really took off (some were more or less working it since before it was a real program), WARC stuff was definitely optional and I remember DXpeditions as recently as the late '80s not doing very much with WARC bands.  There wasn't a lot of point, yet.

Of course, by the late '80s and early '90s, DXpedtioners had figured out how to activate places like Bouvet.  In fact, they seemed to be perhaps a little better at it than we now are and the lack of environmental pooh bahs (not the big factor it now is) probably didn't hurt.

« Last Edit: March 05, 2023, 09:00:20 PM by WO7R »
Logged
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9   Go Up