John, Your response is not one that I would have expected. Until my recent retiremen, I worked for the better part of two decades, as an environmental safety and health consultant. A substantial part of my work involved contacting government bureaucrats at the state and federal level to gain a clear understanding of their interpretation of the rules that they enforced.
Sometimes you did not get an interpretation that you particularly liked, but it was better than making a recommendation to a client without that knowledge. As you can guess, there could be huge legal liabilities to it any other way. The letter you reference would not be an interpretation from the FCC, nor a communication from the FCC other than an unnamed FCC staffer comment. It would not have much, if any legal weight. What the letter amounted to was an ARRL staff interpretation of the rules. This can be helpful as long as their interpretation would be reasonably interpreted the same way by the government staff and they did it in good faith. But you would have minimum legal recourse if you were cited. One thing that I would never do, nor put any faith in, is to just send a cc: to the government without getting some kind of response. You should at least receive something in return to document that the communication was received., and received by the appropriate staffer. If there are rules that are not clear or are actually in conflict as we saw in the Omnibus R&O, and now codified into Part 97, it is our duty to ask for clarification, even if we do not like the answer we receive. Then it is necessary to Petition at some future time and ask for the rule to be changed to what we perceive as the correct way. Otherwise, you can have many quasi-legal activities going on that can be very uncomfortable for most of us who follow the rules. I am very concerned about the ARRL's recent behavior toward the FCC which seems strident and even personal. We only have so much capital to expend (and you never know where that point is reached), but when we use it up, we can pay a rather large price. 73, Rick, KV9U John Champa wrote: >Only from the League's lawyer, silly. That's as good as it gets. > >Anyway, does anyone really want a response directly from the FCC, for Cat's >sake?! >Not I, dear sir. Especially after their recent Uni-Bus or whatever that >crash was (HI). > >Here is the League's strategy: Ask them for specifically what you want. >Document it. If they don't respond with a "NO", you have it. > >Some members of the WG didn't like that passive approach. They wanted all >changes >to published in the Federal Register. Fat chance of that ever happening. >;o( > >Thus the split up started with many of the WG members stating "Who needs >this kind >of support?!". Unfortunately, that is as good as it gets sometimes. > >The FCC just doesn't give a &#$% about Amateur Radio, but Hams don't >generally >understand that....yet (HI). > >73, >John >K8OCL > >----Original Message Follows---- >From: Mark Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com >To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com >Subject: RE: [digitalradio] Re: New ARRL Petition >Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 08:19:02 -0600 > >How is this a response from the FCC? It looks like an opinion from a >lawyer, and the FCC was copied. Where is the FCC response? > >73, > >Mark N5RFX > >At 11:13 PM 12/14/2006, you wrote: > >Attached is the response we got from the FCC via the ARRL: In effect, it > >states > >as long as nobody complains, we (the FCC) don't really care what you do! > > > >
