From time to time we at Hamsexy try to be serious (yeah right) about amateur radio and the good things provided. Well here is one of those times. Please read the below press release from The Foundation for Amateur Radio, we encourage all amateurs to apply for any and all scholarships for which they are eligable in these hard economic times.
==> FOUNDATION FOR AMATEUR RADIO INVITES SCHOLARSHIP APPLICATIONS
The non-profit Foundation for Amateur Radio (FAR) is now accepting applications for 48
scholarships for the academic year 2009-2010 to assist radio amateurs
pursuing higher education.
FAR fully funds two of scholarships and administers 46 others without
cost on behalf of various club and individual donors. Amateur Radio
licensees pursuing a full-time course of study beyond high school and
accepted by or enrolled in an accredited university, college or
technical school are eligible to apply. Scholarship grants range from
$500 to $5000, and preference in some cases goes to applicants living in
particular geographical areas or pursuing certain studies. Non-US
residents are eligible to apply for some of the scholarships.
FAR encourages clubs — especially those in California, Delaware,
Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin — to
announce these scholarship opportunities at meetings, in newsletters,
during training classes, on nets and on their Web sites.
More information and an application form may be requested by letter via
e-mail or by sending a QSL card postmarked prior to March 30, 2009, to
FAR Scholarships, PO Box 831, Riverdale, MD 20738. The application
deadline is May 1, 2009. Headquartered in Washington, DC, FAR consists
of more than 75 area Amateur Radio Clubs. FAR is devoted to promoting
the interests of Amateur Radio and those scientific, literary and
educational pursuits that advance the purposes of the Amateur Radio
Service.
The hamsexy parking lot patrol was on location and found this truly bizarre pickup truck at the Maumee, Ohio hamfest last Sunday.
Yes, that’s right — no need to adjust your monitor — that’s actually a beam on the roof.
And no hamsexy install like this would be complete without hardware store mailbox stickers on the side with the callsign. Especially since the pickup already has an amateur radio Michigan license plate.
Occasionally, we get requests from people who we’ve featured on our site, requesting that we remove them. Under our Polite Request policy, we quite often will comply, and often do. Then, of course, we get letters like this:
It is at the request of the Txswat.com Admin that you remove all copyrighted material belonging to them immediately, otherwise further action will be taken and formal complaints will be filed with our legal department. This includes the youtube videos and all content currently being used on your website without our expressed written consent. We are asking that you promptly comply without disregard. If you have any questions feel free to contact me on my email or by phone.
Thank you very much,
Michael Vinther
TX S.W.A.T.
936-xxx-xxxx
First of all, threatening us with their ‘legal department’ pretty much nullifies the Polite Request policy (at least that’s what our ‘for real’ lawyer told us). Secondly, we are hosting nothing on our site from their group, only a single directly-linked Youtube video.
Here is our reply:
Date: Thurs, Feb 26, 2009 at 7:48 AM
Subject: Re: Removal of Copyrighted material
We have nothing on our site from your organization. All we have is a
direct link to your video on Youtube, which we will not be removing.
You might want to re-check with your ‘legal department’ – but when you
post something on Youtube, you pretty much lose all rights to it as
long as its on Youtube. If you want your video taken off of our site,
you should delete it from Youtube.
Nothing from your organization is hosted on our site, all we are doing
is providing a link to an existing video, a video which you willingly
posted on the world’s most visited video sharing site, a site which
allows and encourages others to externally link to videos (which is
what we’ve done).
Feel free to find a real lawyer and file a complaint, they will tell
you exactly what I’ve just told you.
Regards,
Hamsexy Administration
PS Thanks for visiting the site!
We will keep you informed on any further replies. If you want to see what we are dealing with here, check out their site: http://www.txswat.com/
** UPDATE **
Well, we had a conversation with one of the members of TX Swat, which was quite positive. He admitted he was wrong to try and threaten us, and even offered to give us a formal apology in order to remove the video (which we would never accept, he was very polite and professional and no apology was necessary to remove the video.)
I was about to go onto the site and remove their video, when a much less professional (and a lot more infantile) member of their group decided he absolutely needed to toss his two cents in:
To: [email protected]
From: Michael Vinther
Date: Thurs, Feb 26, 2009 at 7:36PM
Subject: Copyright
That You-Tube video is under copyright. We will give you 1 day to remove it completely or a complaint will be filed. And please, I don’t give a shit! Post this on your pointless website. Storm chasers are the eyes and ears of the National Weather Service, and their purpose is to report and record valuable data from severe storms, which helps improve life saving warnings. Another point… doppler radar can not detect tornadoes, only rotation, so sometimes they may not even have a warning out during a life threatening tornado event.
Methinks Mikey got home from school, saw he missed his chance to get his piece in, and fired off this letter without realizing that his much-more mature and level-headed colleague had pretty much already resolved the issue in his stead. I am not sure who he will be filing a complaint with… It’s been pretty much established that this group doesn’t have a ‘legal department’ as they stated in their first communique with us…. They should probably be filing the complaint against Youtube, since it’s that site that’s hosting the video.
After telling him that we now would not be removing the video, and that he pretty much blew his chances to let this go quietly, he lets loose again:
To: [email protected]
From: Michael Vinther
Date: Thurs, Feb 26, 2009 at 7:36PM
Subject: Copyright I didnt blow it, you are just saying all this shit to piss me off. Go fuck yourself you worthless trash. We do so much to help the public. They even have a series on discovery channel called “Storm Chasers”. Get your fat ass of that moldy chair in your radio shack and go for a walk in whats called outdoors.
Now now now… what would the NWS think if they knew their official storm chasers were using such language? Is this *really* the behavoir of budding meteorologists? I mean, REALLY.
Now, it seems they took our advice and removed the video we originally linked from. So, just because we can, lets show some more of their videos, shall we?
What’s with the sound that camera makes when it zooms? Yeesh.
This one is good. The totally pointless lightshow on the top of the car, along with the plumber’s nightmare on the roofrack is nothing compared to the dangerous stack of radios inside. If these guys were the professionals they claim to be, they’d mount the radios in a professional manner. And, of course, you’ve gotta have the NOAA automated broadcast on in the background.
Hmm… For a group that is so concerned about copyright, they seem to have no problem using copyrighted music in their videos. They got zapped by the Youtube police, and got their audio track disabled. Losers.
This video shows all of the stuff a storm nerd needs to feel comfortable. Generic weather programs like GRLevel3, an SLR camera, a remote control….. more remote control…. more remote control…. camera again… two ipods and a cell phone… stapler… a radio shack scanner…. a thermometer… another thermometer… A tackle box…. An empty keyboard shelf holding a smaller tackle box… bits of white stuff on the carpet…
And of course, no whacker is complete with the requisite lightshow video.
So, enjoy the videos while you can, before loserboy files his ‘complaint’.
Because you asked for it, here are more Skywarn douche chills, brought to you by the fine folks at the Skywarn Online message forums.
Here’s a video by a weather whacker who is in serious denial. First of all, he claims that his car isn’t supposed to to look like an emergency vehicle, yet he has pointless emergency lighting displayed prominently in what he determines to be an “ideal flash pattern.” Flash pattern for what…. letting the Wall Clouds know you’re coming and to make way?
Look…. Storm Chasers are no different than any other breed of whacker out there, and here’s why: civilians, especially those with such pointless hobbies as “storm chasing”, have no more rights on the road than anyone else. If you feel the need to pull over to take photos of a funnel cloud, then put your four-ways on. The *only* purpose emergency lights serve on ‘storm chaser’ cars is the ‘hey, look at me’ factor… the same reason they plaster their car with “STORM SPOTTER” decals, license plates, etc. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a lemon wearing a condom to explain it further:
Here’s another stormchaser truck, this time with a huge ugly lightbar.
All that’s missing the rainbow flag, and it’s ready for the pride parade.
Here’s another video from Youtube, complete with some pretty dangerously mounted equipment.
This setup is proof that these weather nerds have never been anywhere near a real storm. Look at where those CB radios are mounted, with what appears to be a single screw on each side of a flimsy bracket mount. Any sort of good sized jolt will send those fuckers into someone’s skull. And what’s with the “SEVERE STORM COMMUNICATIONS” logo on the window… severe douche chills indeed.
The owner of the above truck is part of a couple of buddies who call themselves… get ready for this… SWAT… “Severe Weather Alert Team”. Isn’t that precious? I bet they wear matching uniforms, too. For info, here’s their Myspace page.
If you’ve got more info in these or any other Whacker stories, email us!
An anonymous submitter sent us these photos, but they should be familiar to anyone who frequents the “Post your Shack/Setup photos” forum on RadioReference.
The OP took a lot of flak for posting these, but I don’t know…. there’s kind of a Kafka-esqe charm to them, and it certainly looks like it belongs to a scanner user. I’m pretty sure a woman hasn’t been anywhere near this apartment in quite some time.
Maybe he’s hoping the fire will take care of the stained carpet and the tobacco-yellowed walls. As always, click on the photos for larger.
… who says you have to be a Ham to be a whacker? Not us!
There are lots of examples of whackers existing without a smelly ham in sight. All one has to do is visit any REACT or weather spotter’s webpage to see them in action.
A reader of the site sent us this gem, the website of the Sundance Citizens Patrol, serving the fine citizenry near Sacramento.
Like most whacker groups, they have a very inflated sense of their worth… according to their website, their goal is to franchise their concept to branch teams across America. This is Whacker Warning Sign number one: make themselves out to be greater than they are.
Their goals, according to their website:
Sundance Citizens Patrol and Emergency Services is dedicated to the growth of our team and it is our goal to be able to provide our services through branch offices throughout the United States. We plan to be associated with the Office of Emergency Services, American Red Cross and Homeland Security. We are currently in the process of providing all of our members with Sundance S.E.R.T. training.
I think he meant to say “C.E.R.T. Training”
Whacker sign number two is assigning their members ranks. Headed by a chief (who has his own Myspace page, btw), he is joined by a mismash of Officers, Captains, Commanders, etc. He also is thoughtful enough to include his recruits on the Officers Page, but keeps their swelled ranks from us by declaring this information “classified”.
Whacker sign number three is outfitting vehicles as ‘response’ vehicles. The only photos of such vehicles belongs to the good chief himself, an older-model Jeep Cherokee. While it doesn’t have the plethora of decals and other pseudo-police markings that is a hallmark of whackermobiles, it does fulfill sign number three by having a copious amount of emergency lighting. Another tick in the checkbox of whack is the fact he calls the jeep his “Traffic Control Response Vehicle.”
As for what this group uses for radio communication, they are surprisingly quiet. Usually an enormous interest in radios is a common thread in whacker groups, but here its significantly absent. There is but a single antenna on the green Cherokee of whack, and it appears to be CB whip.
So, let’s break it down on the Hamsexy patented Whackometer:
For their goals of franchising their original idea, they get the full score of four peppers. For Assigned Ranks, they only get two because their self appointed ranks aren’t nearly as elaborate or unnecessary as we’ve seen. As well, the leader of the group calls himself “chief”, and not “Supreme Commander” or something. They only have one Whackmobile (that we know about) instead of a fleet of vehicles with UNIT 802 on them or something, so again they only get two peppers. The Lights and Sirens category sees three hot peppers, because of the garish display on the youtube video. They would have gotten the full four points, but they didn’t prove they had a siren (or maybe the gay music in the video *was* the vehicle’s speaker, who knows). For Radio Obsession they only get half a pepper, because of the CB antenna. So, all in all, the Sundance Citizens Patrol gets 11.5 out of a possible score of 20. Not too shabby.If you know of a local REACT/ARES/WeatherWhacker/Citizens Patrol group that deserves to be put under the Hamsexy microscope, drop us a line at [email protected].
