Friends. It is time to wake up. Some of you know that I have been locked in a battle with Ofcom over their incompetence regarding my case (all intelligent persons thus far reviewing the data have come to the same conclusion; sheer incompetence). You may also know that my recent formal complaint was swept under the carpet most effectively. What you dont know is that in preparation for a meeting with my MP regarding my situation I sought professional support from EMC consultants from around the UK - mostly the very well-known people; to help validate my complaint ready for the MP. What I was not prepared for was the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that came back; it was not that my case was without merit - all agreed there was just cause to pursue but the problem is that they felt it was simply not worth pursuing. More than that, they felt that amateur radio, AM, SW and SWL is now officially dead. Does that sound alarmist? Remember these are the UKs EMC specialists, at the top of their field. Here is an email from one of the UKs best known EMC consultants, reproduced with kind permission and redacted as necessary to protect his identity. Be warned, this is not for the faint hearted. I have been saying for some time that we are at war and I have lost credibility because of it. Nonetheless I remained stalwart in my resolve to wake UK radio users to the stark reality. You are about to gain insight into that reality and it isnt pleasant. Here is your wake-up call. You can fight or you can give up, its up to you. Horse, water, drink. Hello Nige, I wish I was hearing from you under happier circumstances! When the Radiocommunications Agency was closed down and its duties transferred to Ofcom, we all wondered how the ‘spectrum poacher’ was going to cope with also being the ‘spectrum gamekeeper’. Well, as you’ve been reading the EMC Journal for a while, you will have seen the debacle over PLT, in which Ofcom quite shamelessly in my view showed everyone that it was not at all interested in being any kind of gamekeeper, and I’m afraid that your hobby is suffering as a result. The official understanding seems to be that the radio spectrum that is not actually owned by anyone (i.e. spectrum that is not licensed to someone who pays the Government a handsome annual fee for its use) is suffering from a ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. When no-one owns something, anyone can grab it and deny it’s use to other people simply by bullying. The official position is that Amateur Radio operators should choose another hobby. And that SW and AM radio listeners should instead listen to their radio stations on the Internet. This mantra is repeated all the way down from the Directorate in charge of the EMC Directive at the European Commission, several levels higher than our Ofcom. The only way to get it back is by being a bigger bully. But when the bully is the body with statutory responsibility they are practically impossible to overcome. The Editor and Publisher of the EMC Journal was of the opinion that Ofcom were a disgrace, and encouraged several of us to spend a considerable amount of time, and a lot of his money, on trying to raise awareness in the media, the public, the Civil Service, in the corridors of Westminster (i.e. politicians) even writing to David Cameron (who, when I last heard, had not even acknowledged receipt of his letter). We made contact with the Commons Science Committee (or some such body of MPs) and all the other levers of power that we could find over several years – and got precisely nowhere. Your situation is made especially difficult by two things: 1) Your hobby is a hobby – you can’t claim the EMI is causing you to lose export orders, or lives. 2) The issues are technical, and no-one can understand them. To you and me the technicalities are trivial, sometime in the extreme, but almost everyone you might try to communicate your concerns to does not understand Ohms Law, electricity, radio, or anything that is germane. When people are that unknowing – the technical words we use actually can’t be grasped by their minds, they can’t even remember the words. It’s actually like its Chinese to them. I’ve been an expert witness in US court cases [...] and in the USA the trial judge has to assess whether a proposed expert witness is actually an expert, so during one such hearing I had expounded at length about EMI – in what I thought was very basic language that any educated person must be able to follow – and at the end of it the Judge asked me “Amps – I’ve heard of them! Can you tell me what an amp is?” He honestly had no clue about amperes, or electric current, and he was supposed to be judging a case involving possible EMI [...]. It is almost impossible for us technical people to comprehend how little the ordinary politician, journalist, viewer, etc., understands about electricity, radio etc. As far as they are concerned it might as well be magic and when practitioners of it disagree they have no way of determining who is right and who is wrong. We can make what seems like a perfectly logical and simple argument that anyone must surely be able to understand, then Ofcom (or whoever) employ lawyers to twist the language to reply using phrases that sound equally as reasonable to the audience, but are obviously incorrect to us. The audience can’t choose between us, and so automatically defers to authority and assumes that Ofcom (or other designated authority we are arguing with) must be correct. We simply don’t stand a chance! We learned this plain, ugly fact the hard way over PLT – and I’ve also learned it via my expert witness work in the USA – so I sympathise hugely with you, but I’m afraid your case is hopeless. With PLT, I soon realised that the Government had finally broken the unwritten contract – the Government looks after the money and all that, and the technical experts specify what technical standards to apply in their areas of competency. Because there was short-term financial gain to be had by ignoring CISPR standards (never mind the fact that future generations would pay far more overall through the loss of parts of the radio spectrum) – the CISPR standards were simply ignored by PLT manufacturers and Ofcom and all the other regulators took their cue from the European Commission and just stood back and watched it happen. I realised that given that reasoned arguments would no longer work, the only way to make any headway was to cause political embarrassment by marching on Parliament with banners and slogans and all that, sit down in the street and block the traffic, get manhandled by police, arrested, etc. The trick would be that everyone in the protest would have a science or engineering degree (or higher) and we would make sure the media were present to record the first ever ‘post-graduate march on Parliament’. But out of all the EMC and RSGB people who were desperately critical of Ofcom, the only one who ever volunteered to march with me, over the several years that I kept asking, was [redacted; = a single individual]! A protest march by just two people would not have any kind of effect, so we never did it. Anyway, I’m sorry to have gone on at such length. It’s my way of saying that I really, really, really do understand the terrible way that you are being treated, but that I know from previous painful experience that even if I were to devote all my time and all of what little money and influence I have to supporting your complaint, we would still get nowhere in the end. I’m very sorry. Your lifelong hobby has been crushed by businessmen who want to make money quickly, and the authorities who should be preserving a precious shared resource for our grandchildren are conniving with the businessmen to the inevitable detriment of future generations.It’s exactly like Victorian factory owners pumping clouds of foul smoke into that shared resource, the air, which we now know to be very bad but at the time was seen as an insignificant consequence of making more profits – and anyone who complained about air pollution was simply bullied until they gave up. I understand that once you have the bit in your teeth, and a demonstrable injustice to seek redress for, the adrenaline is intoxicating! We all enjoy a good fight, especially when we know our cause is a just one! But it is a fight you just can’t win, I’m sorry. It is indeed time to seek a different hobby! Or move into the far reaches of rural Wales, Scotland or Cornwall where the air is cleaner, the water purer, and the radio spectrum is not as badly polluted. [...] There’s simply no hope for your fight in the current political and social culture where everything is made a slave of the god of quick money, even if it at huge future expense to others. I truly wish there was some hope, but there is none.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 13:18:07 +0000
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