Hi Jim, One of the "prime directives" of the ARECC Courses is that you and your family and their safety come first before others. That group was violating basic common sense and emergency recommendations that have been developed over a long time. You don't want someone distracted with personal issues in such an environment. Those of us who have served in the military did enough of that!
We do have some very peculiar people these days in leadership positions of various emergency groups who act very elitist and who claim that only hams trained by them or who have taken extensive courses are of much value. Needless to say, most of us know this is absurd since most of the skills can be learned on the job. I have been surprised how poorly some of the "trained" hams compared at times to those who had more practical knowledge. This does not mean I do not recommend training. I have taken several of the FEMA courses and all three of the ARRL ARECC Level courses. The FEMA courses are of very limited value for most of us. It does not hurt to have an overall understanding of the naming conventions of the different levels and the various horizontal positions, but it is very difficult to even remember the material for the exam. And it does not always match up with other services, such as the miltary, but it is what they have decided will be the terminology so we must follow it. The ARRL courses were fairly good, and there is some leeway in the decision making processes although I really felt that the material could easily be compressed into two courses instead of three. I also would like to see the ARRL material freely available to everyone, just like the FEMA material is available. I have lobbied my Division Director to do this without even a response. I know they want the money for the coursework, but I would never pay for the courses if they had not been subsidized. I realize that depending upon your ARRL Leadership position, different Levels are mandatory, but I often wonder if they are having many sign up for the courses at their own expense. The digital material included in the course work is helpful although it had not really covered the transition toward moving digital in the current direction. I could tell that some of my mentors were not fully supportive of that. As far as accepting government money, that is something that is not always easy to come by, but if we can get some grant money, we are more than willing to make suggestions on how to spend it. The equipment belongs to government in our case, and that has helped us a great deal with our repeater which because of its county emergency support, also has a fabulous location and long term emergency back up power. 73, Rick, KV9U jgorman01 wrote: > Rick, > > Good posting. I don't know how many times to say it, I'm not against > volunteering and using ham radio for emergency communications. > However, for me ham radio does come after several other things. I > don't think some of the emcomm folks understand this. For the folks > that went to the South and helped with Katrina, more power to them. > I'm glad they didn't have family or job requirements so they could go > there for what was obviously a quite long period of time. To make > snide remarks about the, I'll call them middle age hams, that didn't > go is an indicator to me of the mindset. > > Some years back I went to a meeting about joining an ARES group. Let > me tell you, they didn't want volunteers, they wanted conscripts. To > the point of even saying they expected us to leave our families to > fend for themselves at times. I threw the sign up form in the trash > and never looked back. My wife would have come home and smashed all > my radio gear if she had been there. My family comes first, my > property second, friends and neighbors third, and ham radio last. If > I had a choice of going to my son's practice or a drill, my son would > win out. Tough cookies if the emcomm folks don't like my attitude. > > The whole point of the thread to begin with was not about doing emcomm > work, it was about whether accepting government money to buy ham gear > was a good thing. Somewhere the thread got off track. > > Jim > WA0LYK >
