Remote Ham Radio(remotehamradio.com) |
Remote Ham Radio(remotehamradio.com) |
This is great for them. Especially since there's practically no setup overhead and no long term commitment - so you can use this one evening, then go back to doing SOTA with a portable QRP rig (and getting talked over by the folks with kilowatt output) the next weekend. It really opens up big station operation to entire new demographics - young people or others with not a lot of money, and urban people or others with no great location or not a lot of space. Ham radio has historically not been that diverse, and if this helps with diversity that's great.
I've used a big station before (at my university. Big tower, big antenna stack, big amplifier). Sure I didn't get to build it, but just operating that thing in a busy contest environment is an experience and made me appreciate how much skill there is in the actual operation of it. I wouldn't want to do it all the time, but I actually know people who do, and myself I don't want to miss the experience of having done it.
What is protected is the actual radio spectrum. If a ham rented out his rig to a commercial entity for the purpose of transmitting business information over ham frequencies, that would be wrong and illegal. But here, the actual transmissions are ham radio transmissions with no commercial value (they contain no economically useful information), so it's (most likely) fine.