[Ham-80211] Re: High power 2.4 GHz rules change

[KC2MMI (Jared)]

<<And what did the hams pay for their bands? >>
 Literally? Hams have "paid" for their licenses, and their bands, by signing a
mortgage on their lives. Don't forget, the reason that hams are required to
demonstrate CW proficiency is to provide a pool of trained radio operators for
military draft. If there was a war emergency requiring radio operators
"NOW"...Yes, that's what your CW requirement was for. That's why the bands
aren't auctioned off to cash bidders, having an incentive for the civilian draft
pool is worth more. Now that the military has moved away from CW and field
repairable radios...Hams may well just become hobbyists, and lose allocations.

 Cell phone versus WISP data rates are something else again, you are talking
about *marketing*. Only a cellco could convince customers to pay ten cents per
SMS message (taking maybe 1/10th of a second on the data channel) when the same
dime will buy them a full minute, 600x more time, on the voice channel. If hams
could be that persuasive, we'd own the air and get paid every time we hit the tx
key!