Here is the offensive paragraph from the WSJ story which most people are referring to.

"The hams also get little respect from telecommunications-equipment companies, such as Motorola Inc. "Something is better than nothing, that's right," says Jim Screeden, who runs all of Motorola's repair teams in the field for its emergency-response business. "But ham radios are pretty close to nothing." Mr. Screeden says ham radios can take a long time to relay messages and work essentially as "party lines," with multiple parties talking at once. Says Mr. Leggett at the Monroe operations center: "We are the unwanted stepchild. But when the s--- hits the fan, who are you going to call?"

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Motorola apologizes for the way Mr. Screeden's comments appeared in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, Mr. Screeden was taken out of context.

Motorola fully recognizes the incredible work that the amateur radio operator community has put forth during the Hurricane Katrina response efforts. In fact, Motorola has at least 100 of its own employees who are amateur radio operators.We also understand the cooperation and partnership that Motorola has developed with the amateur radio operator community in introducing our Broadband Over Powerline solution.

We will continue to work to highlight the unique capabilities that public safety communications and amateur radio operators both bring to significant natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Once again, as demonstrated by the recently publicized cooperation with amateur radio for the Powerline LV test at ARRL headquarters, Motorola values it's relationship with amateur radio and respects the critical and unique work they are doing to help with the Katrina recovery efforts. The recent WSJ article was taken out of context in comparing the simple amateur radio communication capabilities with the very complex Public Safety and Enterprise solutions.

We appreciate the work you and the amateur radio operator community is putting forth. You may not know that Hurricane Katrina has become the largest single disaster recovery effort in our company's history too. We also hope we'll be able to establish a level of understanding and keep our focus on the folks that need it most ... those impacted by Hurricane Katrina.

Sincerely, Jeff Madsen

Director, Communications & Public Affairs Motorola, Inc.
Government & Enterprise Mobility Solutions
Email: [email protected]
Office: (847)-538-7660 Mobile: (847)-341-4462p