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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunate but I’m more displeased with the ARRL. They spend millions on lobbyists and politicians, pay the President A quarter of a million a year, and they’re really not doing that much for it. The website is seriously lacking an up-to-date information about state and federal issues, and I’m very dismayed at what seems to be a lot of money spent but very little to show for it. Ive been an Extra since 2002 and I didn’t renew my membership last year. To me, a humble Ham in tornado country, ARRL just seems like a lot of people hanging on feeding at the trough.

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Lobbyists is exactly what I pay them for.

But other than that, a quarter million sounds huge, but that's not huge for a big, heavily-government-involved national non-profit.

For my own benefit, they orchestrate the classes and testing that I used to get my license, publish excellent reference materials, etc. I'm no longer in tornado country, but in earthquake country and a bigger city, the many different HAM activities are nice to know about.

So I started digging into this and I can’t tell what they are doing, I barely passed political science, but I went to the webpage and clicked on legislative issues and there’s nothing there. So I pulled up the report every nonprofit is required to file, and they are paying lobbyists millions of dollars. What are they lobbying for?

They are lobbying to maintain the status quo. I think their big fear is some politician deciding to sell off the amateur spectrum to Verizon or getting convinced by Cisco that ham radio is bad for wifi and needs to be more tightly regulated.

That said, I cannot speak to whether they are efficient at their lobbying or not.

To me the ARRL membership is worth it for the magazines and email newsletters.

"Seriously lacking" is a good description of their website overall, though.

I have a secret for you, and it’s an app called Libby, which you use with your public library card you digitally check out the books, magazines, and audiobooks from the library. The ARRL magazine is completely free through the library app. You can read it right now totally free.

Many libraries also give you free subscriptions to local and national newspapers. You can stream movies and TV too.

Also an Extra. I actually delayed renewal this year, but then re-upped when I remembered that I'd been using the callsign@arrl.org email forwarded for a bunch of stuff and shelling out for one more year was easier than hunting down all the places I'd used it. I'll probably address that soon and let it go for good after this year.

I do professional microwave radio systems and have next to no interest in getting involved in analog ham stuff.

Ham radio is as analog as your microwave systems are. I'm not going to convince you to become a ham, but hams have a lot of digital voice and data modes at their disposal.

Next to none of which are actually useful for serious IP data traffic any any usable data rates or applications. I'm quite familiar with all of the weird things like psk 31.

Our local club has a 40 mile, 30 Mbps, 5 GHz link that has a lot of services hanging off of it including an HD video stream.

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