For this reason, we tend to avoid the unfortunate term "Amateur" which we inherited a century ago and prefer the term "ham", a leftover from 19th century telegraphy. For many of us emergency and high-tech communicators, a better term might be "para-professional" in that we are unpaid for our services, but perform in a very professional manner. There are approximately 675,000 licensed hams in the United States, about 44,000 in Canada, and roughly three million worldwide. For more information, please see http://www.qrz.com/i/census.html? and http://www.iaru.org/statsum00.html.

First and foremost, BPL is a politically driven issue rather than the technical matter it should be; if it were anything else but political, it would have disappeared along with other poorly-conceived and executed technology such as cold fusion, likewise unworkable. The FCC is not currently demonstrating a "desire to protect the radio spectrum" because its ultimate boss in the White House has made it perfectly clear he wants BPL rammed down the throat of the U.S. Public and will not take "No" for an answer.

As a result of, and toward this end, he has appointed Yes-men to chair the FCC, the first being Michael Powell and the current being Kevin J. Martin, neither of whom were/are willing to contradict their superior on the compatibility of BPL with other licensed wireless services, at least if they wish to keep their jobs. Very much like many other issues, the President does not take kindly to hearing data and information which are not supportive of his political agenda, no matter how factual they might be.

This position has forced the FCC into violating its own regulations with regard to interference emissions by BPL; considerable technical data has been presented by the ARRL at http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/index.html and http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/part15.html demonstrating the potential and actual interference of most existing BPL systems.

Similarly, several other Federal agencies such as the NTIA (National Telecommunications & Information Administration) and FEMA with concern about BPL's deployment have been muzzled by the administration with regard to BPL (see below). However, far worse is the fact that BPL can be made to be interference-free as explained by Bill South N3OH in "Interference: is it the dark underbelly of BPL?" (at http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200607/00001813001.html) through some relatively simple shifts to the gigahertz spectrum and other technological changes, already developed but rejected by the BPL industry leadership.

Adoption of this interference-free BPL technology would solve the interference problems, meet the goals of BPL proponents, and get the American Radio Relay League and us noisy ham protesters off the BPL advocates' backs and permit us to return to our radios. It is not logical that industry and political leaders have dug in their heels, are ignoring the alternatives, and will not make this change. Politics at work.