RadioBanter - View Single Post

January 22nd 05, 08:49 PM

On 20 Jan 2005 18:40:25 GMT, (Jeffrey Herman)
wrote:

Radio Ron wrote:
Nobody seems to care about amateur radio including the hams themselves.If
you question what I say,just hangout on 75 meters and just listen to the
foul mouth bigots and the racial slurs that you hear.It isn't any different

Your brush is too broad. There are over 600 kilohams in the US. You're
hearing at most 100 of them, which amounts to 0.00017 (seventeen
hundred-thousandths), or 0.017% (seventeen thousandths percent). That's
not bad at all. Show us any other group that has such a low percentage
of bad boys.

Even if there were 1000 of them, that still amounts to only 0.0017 or
0.17% of entire amateur population. The problem is that if you so much
as sneeze on HF, half the world can possibly hear you; that factor is
what makes their behavior stand out. If their QSOs were occurring on VHF,
no one except locals would take notice.

Jeff KH6O

I don't think you appreciate the psychology of the situation. Try this
experiment; Take a plain, white piece of 8 1/2" by 11" printer paper.
Using a black magic marker, make a dot about the size of a dime on one
side of the paper. Now, show the paper to several people and ask them
what the first thing is that they notice. The majority of them will
say that the first thing they notice is the black dot.
That dot only covers roughly one half of one percent of the total
surface area of the paper, yet most people notice the blemish first.
They seldom notice that the rest of the paper is untouched.

So it is with ham radio. Outsiders see the blemishes on 75 and 20
meters, yet they don't see that the vast majority of other aspects are
untouched. First impressions mean a lot, and ratios of good-to-bad
operators are meaningless in this respect.