With the recent FCC threats against ABC/Disney and the Jimmy Kimmel Show it’s clear that the First Amendment no longer applies to FCC licensees. U.S. radio amateurs need to keep this in mind and refrain from certain topics and discussions on air. Such topics include:

• Negative opinions about the FCC, the administration, ICE, DOGE, DoJ, DoWAR, etc. This includes discussions of key agencies being led and staffed by Trump lackeys and unqualified TV personalities, and DOGE failing at its mission to save money and having leaked most major US agency databases and citizen personal information to enemy states.
• Verbatim quotes of Charlie Kirk, as verbatim quotes tend to present Kirk in a negative light. However, discussions with material from Kirk debates with clueless 19 year old college kids are probably safe. Any negative discussion of Charlie Kirk is considered hate speech.
• Any positive discussions about DEI, which actually means black and brown people. This is considered woke, which is now forbidden.
• Political violence committed by right wing interests, unless it’s joking about it. Examples from Charlie Kirk, DJT, and others are available on the web.
• Any discussions of antifa, anti-fascism. Anti-fascism, while merely a collection of beliefs and opinions, has been declared a terrorist organization in the US. Just like corporations are people, thoughts are now terrorist organizations.
• Anything that could be deemed anti-Christian or anti-family. This includes discussing non-Christian religions in a positive light as they are by definition, anti-Christian. (Presidents cheating in three consecutive marriages and paying off porn stars to keep quiet about affairs is not anti-Christian or anti-family, it’s what people do when they’re stars, and God loves stars.) Consult National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 for detailed information.
• Support of LGBTQ+, trans rights, gender affirmation, etc. As Charlie Kirk said, being trans is “giving God the middle finger”. However, banging a porn star while your wife is pregnant is giving God a high-five.
• Donald Trump being a convicted felon and rapist, a draft-dodger, and a suspected pedophile. He actually wasn’t convicted of rape, it was technically sexual assault. And Epstein said those girls were 18, or really close.
• Stephen Miller resembling a German S.S. agent. It’s disrespectful to the real leader of the so-called “free world”, as he is the “real brains” behind the curtain.
• Any criticism of Trump supporters, no matter how dim-witted they may be. This includes Trump voters who are farmers now reeling from the effects of tariffs and have tons of crops with no international markets in which to sell.
• Any views that could be construed as left wing, include support for universal healthcare, humanitarian aid, social programs, five day work weeks, mandatory maternity leave benefits, not throwing immigrants into alligator pits, and in general, having empathy for anyone besides themselves. Although originally left wing creations, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid can be discussed.
• Conversations about Jeffrey Epstein or the Epstein files, except about it being a fabricated hoax, of the worst kind, ever, and a national disgrace. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t exist. Total hoax.
• Referring to any Democratically-controlled city as anything other than a “war-ravaged hellscape raped by radical liberals and illegals.”
• While it’s technically redundant using the term “radical liberals“, one should always prefix the term liberal with the adjective radical while on air.
• When discussing national and social problems on the air, the safest way to cast blame is blaming “illegals”, even if they aren’t remotely connected to the issue being discussed. Also, it’s useful to connect “illegals” to any initiative or objective of Democrats. For example, if Democrats are attempting to reduce healthcare costs, one should say that Democrats are “trying to give free healthcare to illegals”. If Democrats want more funds for highways, it’s because they “want to make it easier for illegals to drive into the US”. If the highway program is in a state like Utah or Iowa, it’s so the “illegals can drive faster to commit more rapes and murders in the state.”

While not codified in Part 97, U.S. radio amateurs need to always keep in mind that they use the precious radio spectrum at the pleasure of FCC Chairman Brenden Carr and President Donald J. Trump. Abuse of privileges, as outlined above, could result in being classified a radical and/or terrorist and result in license revocation, imprisonment, or deportation.

Yesterday the Federal 5th Circuit Court struck down an FCC requirement implemented in 2024 that required broadcasters to file an annual form with race, ethnicity, and gender data for employees within specified job categories. Chairman Carr celebrated the decision, as he previously voted against the measure as a commissioner in the previous FCC administration.

Carr was known during the previous administration to periodically release statements ranting about FCC “overreach”, but hypocritically has shown no restraint during his brief tenure as Chairman in having the FCC’s hands meddling in private business, such as in the recent Verizon / Charter merger in which he required Verizon to end any “DEI” practices in human resources. Verizon, undoubtedly eager to get the transaction completed and accurately reading the room, filed with the FCC a letter agreeing, rather than pushing back and risking the loss of an FCC Boot-licker of the Year award and stockholder punishment for a failed acquisition. The Chairman has cleverly and deviously framed his efforts against “DEI” as one against discrimination, but as a contributor to Project 2025 and a loyal Trump acolyte, it’s clear these moves are to further his personal political ideology, and he has no problem with FCC overreach in these instances where it benefits him politically.

While most hams could care less about this, and many undoubtedly applaud the recent FCC efforts to misuse its regulatory muscle in order to further an ideology they agree with, and many wrongly believe advancements for people (especially minorities and immigrants) is a zero sum game which hurts them, this ideology may gore our ox someday, in an unexpected way.

The FCC released a statement claiming they have saved taxpayers $567M. Chairman Carr stated:

“On my watch, the FCC is focused on delivering great results for the country and doing so in an efficient manner. That starts with being good stewards of taxpayer dollars. From day one, we have been combing through every FCC contract to eliminate redundancies and wasteful spending. No stone is being left unturned. To date, we have reduced more than $567 million in authorized contract spending, including by ending bloated or unnecessary IT contracts. This is an important step towards ensuring long-term efficiency and maintaining our focus on the FCC’s core responsibilities.”

It was discovered in early April that three DOGE employees appeared in the FCC contact / personnel directory. The release acknowledged DOGE staffers working at the FCC.

As with nearly all DOGE claims, there is just general information and no detailed analysis or justifications explaining how cancelling such contracts and expenditures was necessary and won’t affect operations or the services provided by the agency, and no third party auditing of the claimed savings. It’s been found that many DOGE claims in the past were misleading, exaggerated, cancelled worthy services, or were just outright wrong. At the time of publication, the DOGE website did not list the claimed $567M savings at the FCC.

The release noted that “the review resulted in savings and efficiencies from the elimination or reduction of contracts for redundant or duplicative IT services, lightly used periodicals and press, unnecessary hog trapping services, tasks more efficiently done in-house, IT licenses exceeding the number of active users, and projects completed ahead of schedule or without exhausting the planned budget, among other circumstances“. Unnecessary hog trapping services? This is rather funny, though it would seem to me that if someone contracted for hog trapping services in the past, there was probably some really good reason (like an infestation of wild hogs at a facility) as most folks don’t arbitrarily buy such services. Undoubtedly this particular embellishment was added to the release for humor and/or to give more rhetoric fodder to the “burn it all to the ground” administration.

The FCC release also alludes to the FCC Delete, Delete, Delete initiative as “to identify outdated and overly burdensome regulations that should be repealed.”, reinforcing that its focus is erasing regulations, not updating or improving them. The DOGE website has an Agency Deregulation Leaderboard, which lists the FCC as having deleted 11,500 words from regulations, allegedly saving $4.5M. Digging in deeper I found the listing is the result of changes to 47 CFR Part 76 in April involving revising cable television rate regulations. There’s no published docket that I can find and the changes appear to have been approved “on circulation“, with commissioners voting directly, rather than going through the customary Notice and Comment Rulemaking process.

The FCC was contacted for comment regarding publication of details of the cancelled contracts and claimed savings amount, however at the time of publication of this article, no response was received.

This article was originally posted on Radio Artisan.

A friend of mine asked recently if perhaps our angst over ARRL was misguided. There is a segment of hams that will hate the ARRL for any reason, often stupid, irrelevant reasons. I still encounter people who are angry about incentive licensing or claim the ARRL is against CW despite running daily CW bulletins. Naturally we should be angry over nefarious activities like canning directors for questionable conflict of interest claims or running shadow boards, but perhaps the decline of ARRL and its membership numbers is just due to the overall decline in the number of people interested in participating in organizations, and out of their control. We see it everywhere, from churches, to fraternal community organizations, to ham clubs with many withering away due to lack of interest.

To an extent, I think he’s right. If you were a maker of buggy whips in the early 1900’s, your ox was undoubtedly going to get gored with the advent of the automobile. Amateur radio itself is in a bit of decline. If the demand for an organization to support something just isn’t there, there isn’t much an organization dedicated to that thing can do. But I’d also argue the answer is a bit more complicated and nuanced.

Let’s break down what ARRL is to people. I think there are two buckets: those who see it as a magazine and publication company / content provider and those who see it like the “NRA of amateur radio”.

From a magazine and publisher perspective, they have fallen behind. Magazines are dying and ARRL continues to hold tight to the “we publish a monthly periodical” way of publishing. They haven’t embraced any real sort of new electronic media; the app the publications are on is just a replacement for paper. Complicating this, there are a lot of members who feel stiffed they don’t get a paper copy in their hands each month, at least not without paying more for it. Another problem with ARRL’s magazine model and magazines in general is they just can’t compete with the breadth and timeliness of the Internet, like social media, groups, websites, or good ole email reflectors. Take me, for example. I like to build stuff. Is it likely the one article they’ll have in QST next month will strike my fancy? Maybe, but probably not. I’m on a few QRP Groups.io groups. I see several postings a week that interest me and often cause me to jot stuff in my design notebook. If I’m a creator and have some great new thing to show the world, am I going to wait six months for my article to get published? No, I’m going to get it out on the Internet in some form or fashion and interact with other like-minded people who want to talk about this new great thing. In the world of “ARRL is a magazine subscription”, they have fallen short, clinging to an old, outdated model.

ARRL could have also embraced and even owned amateur radio social media and integrated this in with a content publication strategy, but they totally missed the boat on this, too. The time to do this would have been back when QRZ.com changed from selling CDs to a Slashdot-clone amateur radio site and eHam was trying to be the same thing with a lousily-colored and formatted website. Both sites early on showed just how toxic mismanaged social media could be, and ARRL could have beat them all and done it much better. But they didn’t, and later they didn’t even attempt to have a notable, focused presence on social media like Facebook. They kept within their sandbox of QST and field staff shaking hands at dwindling hamfests.

Then there’s the segment that considers ARRL the NRA of amateur radio. They advocate, protect, lobby, and provide services. The NRA peddles fear, fear that “they” are going to take “your” guns away. It’s how they rile up and motivate membership and keep, or rather kept the dollars flowing in so Wayne LaPierre could live the good life. But beyond lobbying and money scandals they offer everything a gun owner might want. What does ARRL peddle? Preservation. They promise to preserve amateur radio and the status quo, and occasionally raise some funds with spectrum defense. Why does ARRL still run the antiquated NTS, or push emcomm so much? Why aren’t they really involved with digital standards or pushing open systems and software? It’s easy to do what you’ve been doing for decades, and hard to do something new. You can buy a brick paver with your name on it that will adorn the back patio at HQ, and will let future generations of hams know of your kind generosity long after you’re SK and forgotten. ARRL is like amateur radio formaldehyde. Ham radio may eventually die, but they’re going to keep it from rotting. However, it will smell a bit funky.

The Maker movement is the bridge to the future of amateur radio. Makers are tinkerers, like amateur radio used to be. They are essentially amateur radio operators without the radios, FCC licenses, and the “historical baggage” of their hobby, like amateur radio (we gotta do emcomm, “we provide a service to the public”, “we got to make up reasons to ham like ‘I need to collect all 50 states’ “, etc.). You look at their publications and websites and they’re just full of energy and ideas. Makers don’t need cringey magazine covers with a teenage girl awkwardly posing, touching the VFO knob of a rig she’s never used. They don’t have gatekeepers like amateur radio, where one has know some code to be a “real ham”. They don’t care if you have purple hair, or if you have an in-y or an out-y, or both. They don’t care if you sleep with someone with an in-y or an out-y. Or both. Interest and curiosity alone is enough to validate one as a Maker, and there’s no pecking order based on what tests you passed, how many 59s you exchange on a weekend and there are no “collect all X” of something as a rite of passage. Makers like new cutting-edge hardware and old, antiquated (“retro“) hardware just as much. They’ll even combine both and make things like a Raspberry Pi driving old Nixie tubes. Why? Because they can. Most makers may never have touched a ham radio, but on a philosophical level they get why one would want to pump Morse code through a satellite, or take four diodes, a DDS module, and an audio amp chip and make a direct conversion receiver. ARRL continues to this day to fail to recognize the opportunity we have with Makers.

While the changing winds over the decades may have made ARRL unneeded or obsolete, I’d still call what has happened a failure of leadership, and it was preventable. With a for-profit company there is a life cycle graph that looks something like a hill. Companies start up, grow in adolescence, mature and reach a peak, get over the hill, and later die. A skillful business leader will recognize where an organization is at in the cycle and “re-invent” the business after a peak to create a new upswing, and a new, higher peak. I think the same applies to a non-profit like ARRL.

The current CEO naturally can’t take all the blame, but he doesn’t seem too interested in righting the ship. We could probably trace ARRL failures in leadership all the way back to the 70s. In recent ARRL history there was only one innovator CEO, and he was unceremoniously canned. It was said he was unconventional and a bit disruptive; that was exactly what ARRL needed, and still needs today. While all ARRL CEOs were undoubtedly successful in business in their careers, I sense most were looking for a sort of “retirement position” as an ARRL CEO, pulling a paycheck but not having to really bust their butts or make waves. Until ARRL gets out of the business of preserving itself as an ongoing entity, the organization will continue its journey into irrelevancy.

In the 1990s the FCC denied the license renewal of Herbert Schoenbohm, KV4FZ. The action raised eyebrows as it was the first time the FCC applied its “Character Policy” to an amateur radio licensee. Schoenbohm had been convicted of credit card fraud, in activities totally unrelated to amateur radio and his FCC license. After a very lengthy legal process the courts ruled against KV4FZ in 1998, siding with the FCC. Originally intended to be applied to broadcast licensees, the Character Policy isn’t directly codified in Title 47, but is outlined in a 1986 document and was later amended in 1990.

Recently the FCC has begun pursuing what may best be called an Ideology Policy. Chairman Carr has launched investigations into several media outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC/Comcast, NPR/PBS/CPB, and 13 PBS stations . Verizon is also under investigation for diversity hiring practices. President Donald Trump recently threatened CBS over the Sixty Minutes interview of the Ukrainian president, and threatened to cancel their license, oblivious of how networks, TV stations, FCC licensing, and the Constitution actually work. The FCC investigations are quite frightening, threatening freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and civil rights, all key tenets of democracy. Carr has weaponized the FCC, flexing its regulatory muscle to serve the political will of Trump and exact retribution upon any entity regulated by the FCC which crosses Trump. Ironically, Trump himself could likely never acquire an amateur radio license or any FCC license, having 34 felony convictions, a rape sexual assault conviction, and a host of other indictments, if the Character Policy was objectively applied.

Previously the Character Policy was employed in amateur radio only in cases of licensees with felony convictions, however the language in the policy is rather broad, with the up-for-interpretation term of “misconduct” as grounds for the FCC revoking privileges. What could be ascribed as misconduct in today’s political climate? Perhaps someone having one too many 807s some evening and spouting off on 80 meter phone about Trump’s tariffs torpedoing their retirement fund? Speaking up at a town hall? Attending a protest in DC? Being registered with the “wrong” political party?

Some may argue this is in conspiracy theory territory. In normal times I would wholeheartedly agree. This ain’t normal times.

ARRL responded to the FCC Delete, Delete, Delete initiative with a wishlist including the elimination of several digital limitations, licensing changes, and the implementation of a 22 year old WRC / ITU third party traffic treaty requirement. I’m not sure if ARRL was attempting to appear like they’re doing something or if they’re just incredibly naive and couldn’t put two and two together with the current political climate. The purpose of Delete, Delete, Delete is not an opportunity to advance the radio art, increase technology enjoyment, or enhance the next generation of radio amateurs. It has merely two purposes: 1) slash costs at the FCC and 2) facilitate commercial interests and revenue through the elimination of regulations. It’s that simple.

ARRL seems to think they’re dealing with their grandfather’s FCC and it’s business as usual. It’s not. If anything, ARRL’s wish list illustrates the FCC’s disconnection with amateur radio and ARRL’s ineffectiveness at lobbying the FCC to keep amateur radio rules current the past two decades.

Regarding outdated FCC digital rules, here’s a little inconvenient reality I’m just going to throw out there: if you’re an experimenter and you want to unleash some new mode that exceeds bandwidth or symbol rate rules, be like Nike and JUST DO IT. Seriously. Just don’t QRM anyone. The FCC isn’t going to do anything. Both the FCC and ARRL have been totally oblivious to the de facto encryption in digital voice modes over the years, a clear rule violation. ARRL has never been a champion of open systems or taken the lead with digital technology standards. If you’re running some digital mode that runs afoul of FCC rules ARRL might send you a sternly-worded letter and complain to the FCC. When was the last time the FCC busted a ham for intentional technical violations? Just don’t speak out against the FCC or the administration on the air. More on that later.

Tariffs imposed in the US are wreaking havoc with markets and the world economy, and torpedoing retirement funds which were, for me, chugging along and growing quite nicely the last few years. The tariffs present a double whammy for US hams. Japanese and Chinese transceivers, a mainstay for the hobby today, will see price hikes like never before. One might think this will be a boon for American radio manufacturers. Those manufacturers would be, well, Elecraft. The second tariff whammy will be component prices. Most components come from overseas, so they, too, will see massive price hikes. So even if Elecraft could ramp up production (they can’t), prices for their already pricey rigs will likely be through the roof. Wayne Burdick, N6KR, of Elecraft posted recently on the K4 Groups.io, “As for tariffs—we appreciate your concern. We’ve already absorbed a lot of them and we’re holding our breath on the rest.” (Despite many people believing the country exporting items pays the tariffs, it’s actually the importer, and a tariff is essentially a sales tax as the money goes to the federal government.) Kits will take a major hit as well with the era of cheap, quick, and easy custom PC board production for hobbyists will be over.

Financial analysts are all abuzz. Opinions naturally vary, but there are predictions that the US is headed for a market crash, resulting in recession or even a Trump Depression. It’s not all that far fetched, and history has an example to look to. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. The intent was to protect American farmers and manufacturers by making foreign goods more expensive. It failed, miserably, and was a contributor to the Great Depression.

If we look back in history during the Great Depression, or more appropriately and attune with today’s political climate in the US, Nazi Germany in the 40s, people cobbled together radios with whatever they could find. Normal everyday citizens risked capture and certain death using homebuilt transmitters in the Resistance to relay crucial information to the allies, helping defeat the authoritarian Nazi regime.

Radio amateurs are historically a resourceful and creative bunch. With equipment and component shortages quite likely in an extended trade war and resulting Trump Depression, being able to build rigs with junkbox parts will go beyond a novelty and perhaps become a needed skill, or serve as something to pass the time while unemployed or awaiting delayed Social Security checks to arrive from the DOGE-gutted Social Security Administration.

Depression rig designs are readily available on the Internet and classic QRP texts, especially those of the late Doug Demaw, W1FB (SK). Even a one component transceiver design like the venerable Pixie or the FETer, which can be soldered together in an hour, can yield reasonable results on the air. Manhattan or “ugly” style construction will be the way to go as printed circuit boards from overseas will be prohibitively expensive. If one does not have or cannot obtain copper clad boards, tin from food cans can be soldered to and serve as a suitable substrate for RF projects, and be used to fabricate enclosures as an added bonus. As always, where there is a will, there is a way. Like many of the other difficult times in our history, radio amateurs will weather the storm and we will get through this self-induced and needless brutal financial disaster.