Pat Murphy Wrote:
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> First up for Congress returning from Thanksgiving:
> funding the government. The government will shut
> down Dec. 11 unless a funding bill is passed!
Oh, no, they're not going to try this bullshit again, I hope. Can the political operatives in control of the Congress be that hellbent on making themselves appear even more brain-damaged and irrelevant? No one wants this to happen, except for a tiny minority of extremists with no fucking sense at all.
I would not wish another government shutdown to happen again, even if it it meant that there were five times as many pirates on HF as there are now. The impact on local governments and places that rely heavily on government spending is not trivial. None of us can afford to be impacted by this kind of political bullshit.
The FCC appears to be ignoring illegal HF activity except in cases where an explicit complaint has been sent to them. Witness the YHWH dude firing up a couple of times a day all over the bands with seeming impunity now since at least May 2013. He's practically invited the FCC to come out to his solar-powered shack. Witness also the "old time radio" station who's apparently been running 24 hours a day for several months now with only a few breaks. Most, if not all of the "traditional" HF pirate operators are very careful not to do stupid shit that would surely invite an FCC complaint, such as, say, fire up on top of a MARS network on 6903.5 in progress. That doesn't mean that they're not aware and not listening. Surely they are -- in this day of cheap SDRs they probably record the whole spectrum to disk for playback later in case they need to. I suspect that they are much less likely to go after HF pirates unless there's a complaint because most of the HF pirates have no money and chances of the FCC getting any payback via fines is low.
