Rebuttal to Zanoni’s Rant

Dexter Maitland

My name is Dexter Maitland, W6OIC. I am a friend of Mike Zanoni, NG7A. I read the material on his initial amateur radio web site effort and had such strong comments that he offered space for my rebuttal to his (I consider) limited point of view. First, let me give some information about myself. I am the person Zanoni writes about on one of his other web sites as the “Wandering Hermit.” Do not believe much of what he says about me. What you can believe is that I live much of the time in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, that I travel to Arizona and Hawaii depending upon the weather, and that I practice medicine. I own very little and carry most of it with me. I have small “caches” of supplies stored in various places. I maintain an extensive correspondence primarily through use of public computers in coffee shops and libraries. In fact, I am writing this at one of the public access computers at the Humboldt County library in Eureka, California. To read Zanoni’s accounts of me, one would think that I am some sort of wizard or medical guru. The fact is that I am just another burnout who figured out a way to make his life productive and at the same time without great stress.

Zanoni makes the point that amateur radio has become something without a heart, an activity based around “rice box” transceivers used by “no-code extra-class” operators who are without knowledge of fundamental principles of electromagnetic radiation. He rails on about operators who purchase “jumped up VHF CB equipment.” He criticizes VOIP as not being radio at all. Let me first say that I agree with everything he says. Operators have lost touch with the beauty of constructing equipment. Few operators around could respond to a widespread long-term devastation of our wireless social infrastructure and construct an operable transmitter-receiver from a TV set. (I know that Zanoni could because he has done so as an exercise in discipline.) Yet, in spite of agreeing with all of his points, I still think that he misses an important point: Many people are just not able to do what he does; because they cannot does not make them wrong, it just makes them different from him.

I offer one major point in rebuttal of his position: I use Echolink quite a bit. (I have been able to download the software to several public access computers and get around the server firewalls. Most of these terminals are in locales where someone apparently talking to himself while wearing Walkman earphones at the computer is taken for granted.) Many of the operators I talk to are quite elderly and no longer able to operate a transceiver or key because of conditions like blindness or Parkinson’s disease. I routinely chat with a 93 year old ham in central Oregon who has been licensed since 1931. He is totally blind, and lives with a grandson who logs onto Echolink for him. He waits for someone to call him and can easily push the space bar as a PTT switch. I would never take the joys of hamming away from him, even though we both know this is not really radio. I also talk to lots of young hams with their “no code” license who have no idea about the way things were when Zanoni or I were their age. I hear the same awe in their voices that I know was in mine the first time I made an AM contact on my Heathkit HW10 over forty years ago. I would not take that experience away from them.

Overall, I think Zanoni has a point, but I also think he has to lighten up. If he really wants to make a difference, then he should start solving the problem rather than ranting on about it. If he wants to worship the joys of home-brewing, then he should come up with simple workable projects that others could emulate. How else did we learn? (I really think the issue is that Mike does not want to change his name to “Elmer!”)

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