ORIGINAL: KidEpoxy
Bob
I've heard very little criticism of that group, just a bunch of arrows being slung at the club. If this group was responsible, the situation wouldn't exist to begin with.
You are perhaps not considering the swell acceptance a variation of Abel's "Draft Letter" got from the club fanboys last time we did this.
Post#11 from the [link=http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_6940449/anchors_6950457/mpage_1/anchor/tm.htm#6950457]Site Seperation thread[/link]. If we go back to Abels original Draft Letter, we see that the situation you describe, non-members attempting to be responsible and get a freq sharing plan with a club, was too outrageous and unbearable for some diehard fanboys of 'established' sites.
I've read the draft letter, and yeah, there are some problems with it, IMO. The draft letter, as written, isn't a "sharing agreement" it's a proclimation of what the group is going to do, come heck or high water. It's essentially "here is what we're going to use, so you can't use 'em, and if we decide later to use some more, we'll let you know so you don't use them, either". It actually sounds as if it's meant to be a response to having been told "you can't fly here" or the equivalent.
IMO, part of the problem is that we really don't know what communications have transpired between the club and the "rogues", other than that they don't want to join the club.....and that may be a response to "join or we'll get you run off". We just don't know.....although from some of the responses here it seems to me that some are assuming that such may have happened.
But even if we assume for a minute that such a letter would be a "good faith" attempt to share frequencies, we still run into the same issue of the "rogues" being an unorganized group, no leadership, no method of communication, and no way of knowing from day to day who may show up to fly on what channel. How is the list of channels to be communicated? Word of mouth? Some sort of sign that Joe Random posts on county property? Who is going to tell Joe Newbie that he cant use channel X? Who is going to enforce it if Joe Newbie says "Well, I've got channel X, and I'm going to fly anyway. Just who do you think YOU are"? With no structure/organization or teeth behind it, it's going to fail and one or both groups are going to continue to lose planes. If that is what happens, and were I in the club I would fell like I really had no choice but to switch to 2.4 to protect my own equipment.
The "rogues" have set up shop within the interference area of a club that's been in existence for 20 some years. There is no question that they
HAVE that right, (assuming that they have permission from the county to fly there) but the question that should be asked is
IS it right? IMO the answer to that is NO.