SoCal GliderGuider

This looks an awful lot like the pot calling the kettle black. Of all the groups I have been involved in, the sailplane pilots break the rules more often than any other. It starts with launching and flying over houses, exceeding the 400 ft altitude limit near airports, flying over the pits, flying behind the pits, landing behind the flight line, and on and on.

I have several friends that are into extreme soaring and fly considerably in excess of the posted AMA speed limit for turbines. Having callers on the line hiding behind boiler plate is not exactly amoung the safer things what we do as modelers.

Why rag on one of the very few people that have actually built and do fly spread spectrum? Why rag on any area of modeling? We are all in this together.

Reducing spread spectrum to the use of only thremal sailplanes will increase the price, do to lack of demand... not decrease it. The demand for the first units of any technology has always been at the top end of the market and then there is a trickle down affect. The guys that want a spread spectrum unit NOW are willing to pay the piper. Sooner or later, it is likely that we will all have it. If you want it NOW, open your wallet and start dumping out the cash.

I suppose that the AMA does watch the FCC fairly closely, along with the FAA, OHS, and other agnecies. I am not aware of the AMA making a major deal about any of it unless there is some percieved threat. If you don't want to be an AMA member, it is not a requirement. If, on the other hand, you want to fly at a site, or at sanctioned events where the members of a club have chosen to charter with the AMA, you have no choice. That is your decision and the decision of the club. There is at least one member of this forum that chooses to go to the hi desert here in So Calif and fly a turbine without an AMA membership. There is certainly no reason that you can not do the same, if you so choose.