Pointless in the extreme

The ARRL reported yesterday that, in a shining example of government inefficiency, the FCC intends to lower fees for amateur vanity call signs by one penny per year. Honey! Come here and see this! Looks like we'll be able to afford that yacht after all!

In fairness the lowering of the vanity call sign fee is in the context of an overall fee restructuring across most if not all communications services including TV, commericial radio, etc. That being said the FCC's process for dealing with Notices of Proposed Rulemaking is that there will be a period in which the public may file comments. I can guarantee you that there will be at least a few comments filed by amateurs who feel compelled to pontificate on this matter, and by doing so will generate work for the FCC who has to compile, read, and consider comments on NPRMs.

The smarter thing to do would have been to simply leave the vanity call fee structure alone and not draw attention. And the cost of vanity call signs just recently increased, so why now a decrease? Is all this churn worth the effort and expense? It's like the US Postal Service raising stamp prices by two cents every year or so; the cumulative cost of publicizing each change, changing signs at the Post Office, reprinting documents, modifying the website, reprogramming the stamp dispensers, etc is more than the revenue generated by the price increase.

Seems like there are better ways for the government to spend my taxes. Like, I dunno... Lowering my taxes?

in reference to: FCC Looks to Lower Fees for Vanity Call Signs (view on Google Sidewiki)

Sorry: Have to activate comment moderation

For a long time I have been allowing free posting of comments. Unfortunately I have seen an increasing frequency of spam comments to my posts. These appear innocuous enough on the surface, usually saying something like "Thank u..." Invisibly contained within the comment is a long list of web URLs to porn sites. I have to manually delete these, and it's officially become annoying as of this evening.

The change is fairly innocuous; anyone coming from outside Google will have to complete a "captcha" by verifying a couple of words.

RadioShack - Past, Present, and Future..?

Recent news reports that Best Buy may acquire RadioShack have been causing me to reflect on the role "The Shack" played in my childhood, my interest in technology and radio, and how much they've changed in 40 years.

I sometimes like to joke that RadioShack was my first consulting client, but there's an element of truth to that. In 4th grade every day after school I would walk over to my local RadioShack (on the corner of W Chapman Ave and Haster St in Anaheim) to spend an hour or more looking at their CB radios and other things I couldn't begin to afford. The store manager finally got tired of wiping my fingerprints off his display cases and offered me a job delivering catalogs to the local neighborhood; paying me in store credit. After a strenuous week and a couple of spills on my bicycle (the catalogs were a lot heavier than the newspapers I was used to delivering) I was able to afford a real walkie-talkie; not one of those 100 mW Channel 14 toys I'd received for Christmas the year before but a REAL radio with channels and meaningful output power. I didn't stop hanging around the RadioShack (because there were always more catalogs to deliver) but I felt like I was part of the store family.

Within a couple of years I'd moved away to New Jersey to live with my father and there wasn't a RadioShack close by, but the school I attended had a fairly good electronics club and a computer lab with punch-card programmable calculators and (of all things) a DEC PDP-8. By the time I returned to California in 1979 I'd become fairly proficient at programming, and there was a RadioShack at the mall on my way home from school selling the newly-released TRS-80 Model II. I would sit there every day, read the BASIC language manual, and try to modify the looping demo program so it would display my name, personalized messages, etc. The manager got annoyed one day when a friend of mine decided it would be funny to write something R-rated, and I was not welcome in the store for a while. Then one day I saw him looking around the mall, turns out he was looking for me. He said that he wanted to customize the TRS-80/II's demo program to promote some store sales, and wanted me to do that for him. He offered to pay me in (of course) store credit. My second consulting gig for The Shack lasted only a short time, but for the second time in my life I was part of a store family.

The rapid changes in technology which came in the years following had a dramatic effect on RadioShack. In 1985/86 despite a store being closer to our Coast Guard base I was driving an additional 30 minutes one-way to places like Electronics Plus in San Rafael to buy parts for custom designed circuits. This continued once I was back in civilian life; most of my time was spent in places like Quement, HSC/Halted, Santa Cruz Electronics, etc. It felt in a way like I was betraying my RadioShack "family" but as the complexity of my designs increased I simply could not buy what I needed from them.

Over the years I've remained hopeful that RadioShack will return to its roots and focus on the hobbyist/experimenter. A while back they updated their selection of components with the bin drawers, and I was very happy back in 2008 to see that they were actively supporting the San Mateo Maker Faire by both selling tickets and exhibiting product at the event. I had visions of being able to buy Arduino shields in a store and browse bins full of interesting I2C chips, but that never happened. It's ironic because you'd think RadioShack would be perfect to become the storefront for the Arduino/Maker circuit hacking movement, but its online stores like Adafruit and SparkFun that dominate. Even the "old school" electronic stores like Anchor Electronics are starting to carry circuit hacking accessories like connector breakout boards.

Yesterday I went to my local RadioShack looking for a solderless breadboard. I'd checked their website and it said that this particular store had some in stock, but the kid working there told me that they hadn't stocked such things in a couple of years. Frustrating, and also sad.

It will be a sad day if and when RadioShack is snarfed up by Best Buy. All things must change, I suppose. I could say that I'll miss my RadioShack "family" but the reality is that they've been gone for a long time now. Like the parent of a missing child I long for their return, or at least the knock of a policeman at my door who brings news so I can begin mourning and find closure.