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I am starting to just laugh at some of you.
You won't contribute to DXpeditions (at least one of you loudly now says as much). As if it were some sort of virtue.
But, you won't do anything to make expeditions more reasonable to put on, either.
You don't go yourself, so you have no real feel and understanding of the burdens you are placing on other people.
You are dimly aware, at best, that the DXpeditioner is subsidizing you.
But, we must somehow freeze the world in place and pretend it is still 1966 as far as DXpeditioning goes. When, in fact, it is not.
Love RIB, hate RIB, but recognize one key fact.
They did it in response to changes in the externally imposed rules that actual DXpeditioners have to follow.
The entire RIB technology was devised by DXpeditioners. They did not do it on a lark or to troll you.
They did it because of externally imposed rules that you and I, the stay at homes, refuse to react to. We want DXCC to be hard. Well, to a degree, so do I.
But, you all don't seem to care if life changes to make it harder. Or that it makes DXpeditioning much more expensive than it once was. The pain we are willing to inflict on others to preserve the illusion of yesterday is immense. I don't agree with that one. I want a healthy DX program. By contrast, one that is a sucker's game; that is impossible if you started after 2006 has no future. Worse, any of those under 40 that read the tea leaves as I do will quietly leave if we all, the ones that "got ours" in the 1990s, refuse to bend.
You worry about too many grey beards in DXing? Maybe you should rethink your belief that the rules came on godly tablets.
RIB is a shot across some of our self-satisfied little bows. It is telling us in no uncertain terms, from those that actually do it, that the game has changed. And, they are trying mightily to square the circle between our fantasies of a world that hasn't changed with one that actually has.
Example: If we relented, selectively, on the /MM thing (for instance) just for three places: Bouvet, Peter I, and Heard, we could have annual expeditions to these places. Our stations would not change. The pileups would barely change. It doesn't really affect us.
What would change drastically is the cost we impose on other people. But oh, no, anything but that. Making life a little more bearable for those that subsidize us is the worst. Why, we might actually have more DX to actually work because the dollars are, in the end, limited. Can't have that one.
Similarly all this angst on where the DXpeditioner's butt resides does not affect you and I in the slightest. But, it does reduce the expense and reduces the ever-mounting environmental objections to dozens of places, including at least two of the three I mentioned. Plus others I didn't. It also, as the photo I posted demonstrates, increases the number of places we can DXpedition from. That's more than "convenience" in some parts of the world. It is my understanding that South Sandwich happens because of a particularly nasty little maneuver on Thule Island and only Thule Island. Well, what if RIB means more of the islands in the South Georgia chain became possible? Would that interest you? It would sure interest me.
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