I've worked in commercial radio before. This is a bad idea. They're phasing out an old system because it's too slow to be useful. Slow voice coms are alway useful in an emergency. We setup a system to send plain text reports at 300 baud. It was fantastically fault tolerant and worked in terrible conditions, like those in an actual disaster. It had very few parts required and almost any computer that could emulate a serial port over usb could use it.

I don't see how requiring high speed coms in an emergency is practical. Keeping simple analogue links is the best way to make sure you can keep going. It also keeps things simple. In some situations you have 30 year old radios that have only been turned on 3 or 4 times a year in civil defence huts dotted around remote areas.

I'm not into amature radio in any way but I just don't understand that call at all.

> So, ham clubs are now being treated like any other commercial user of the mountaintop, and will have to pay leasing fees each year to be there. This whole letter just sounds like "MAN YELLS AT CLOUD"

They’re non-commercial though, and have a proven record of being valuable in emergencies. And I don’t mean “hey there’s a big fire” — I mean something really, really bad happened.

> The most noted change was the removal of all Amateur Radio capabilities and interoperability. They have become heavily reliant on high speed data systems and statewide linked repeaters, and simply don't see the value we brought to the table.

Still doesn’t seem that great. It seems very short sighted to charge ham operators commercial hosting fees (which are likely unsustainable for ham clubs). And should they be needed, they’ll still be unavailable.