[aprssig] for-profit amateur was Igateing stuff

[Jim Lux]

Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 22:05:38 -0700
From: "Andy Gonzales" <KG6RWO at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [aprssig] Igateing a Non Amateur

I can fully support bringing in money to support a service as with the FINDU
service, but I throught that making money as in a profit, was not in the
letter or the spirit of the amateur radio service.

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It's the over the air part that is "non-commercial".. One big justification 
is to keep folks who should be buying business licenses, participating in 
spectrum auctions, etc., from using ham bands.

In any case, providing services and products to hams for profit is 
certainly within the spirit of the amateur world.

one of the purposes of the Amateur Radio Service is to advance the state of 
the radio art. An ambitious amateur might develop some new modulation 
technique, and there's no particular reason why they should provide it to 
all for free.  They may wish to patent it, for instance. (as SCS has done 
with Pactor III). They would have to publish the description of the 
modulation (to avoid problems with the "coded message" prohibition).

They'd have to be careful of running afoul of the part 97 restrictions 
while testing though.  They might need a Part 5 experimental license instead.

If an ambitious amateur were to develop some sort of support software or 
hardware, especially that didn't require on-the-air testing, I can't see 
where Part 97 would feature at all.  Hmm, if it were some sort of whizbang 
speech compressor, and hams were testing it on the air, it might be a bit 
tricky..

Then there's that big grey area of hams who develop something for 
themselves (like an antenna), testing it on the air, and then decide to 
commercialize it.

Anyway... it's the use of the RF spectrum that the non-commercial rules 
apply to.

Jim, W6RMK