Senate Passage of Amateur Radio Parity Act

KM6CQ - Dan

"Do not sacrifice your hobby for the right house."  I will not buy a new house because I can not have the antenna system that I want. But it does not stop there, they will make a violator out of you with their laundry of list elitism. No thanks, I done that more than once and never again. I'd rather live (and I do) in a older place and enjoy my hobbies. CC&R's and HOA's are a group of people you pay to tell you what to do.

KY6LA_Howard

Historically CC&R's were created by lawyers at banks who made construction loans to developers and needed consistency of product so that they could package the loans for resale ...it had nothing to do with maintaining property values.

External Antenna Resstrictions started to appear in the 1960's when cable companies PAID developers to ban TV antennas so that they could force homeowners to buy cable TV.

OTARD - over the air receiving devices came into effect in 1995 when Direct TV paid off congress to allow external satellite. Dishes.

Since lawyers are lazy, they normally just copy the last set of CC&R with no thought whatsoever.

In California it is virtually impossible to buy a house without CC&R. This is made worse because cities insist on CC&R as part of a development plan and they love the Franchise Fees from cable TV.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

One consequence of CC&R's in California is that the few properties without them are significantly more valuable than those that have them

My street's CC&R expired in 1997 which resulted in a huge construction boom of mega mansions that.were illegal before plus my tower. Our property values have soared 400% BTW. The price boom on my street puts a lie to the claim that antennas hurt property values.

Walt - KZ1F

@Mark, How many semester hours do you have in contract law? If you'd like I can lend you one of my law books on contracts.

Mark WS7M

Walt... Zero.    My point seems to be missed.   If our CC&R's were "normal" and in compliance you bet your **** you are spot on right.  One-sided modification pretty much impossible.

However our CC&R's are in violation in about 6 different areas of a recent (approx 4 years ago) law and we are in the process of re-writing sections to be compliant.

When this came up our HOA sought resident volunteers to work on and review the laws.  Of course I jumped in.  We are not lawyers and none of us wish to be lawyers and our HOA is taking the approach that "we" will write the sections and pay our HOA lawyer to review and approve for finalization.

We went over the entire CC&R.  When we got to the section on Antennae I was surprised that some of the people on the panel I thought would object were suddenly very much for allowing certain kinds of antennae mainly due to the fact that we have City WiFi coming in and we wanted to prepare our neighborhood to allow network antennas to work on the city WiFi.  

I sat in this meeting with a pile of paperwork that I almost never had to open and start pushing.   We re-wrote our CC&R antenna section to allow satellite dishes, and small footprint antennae up to 25 feet in height if placed on the roof of the home.  

One neighbor at the bottom of our canyon, not even a ham, said, 25 was not enough for her home to get line of sight to town.  So we wrote in a section allowing up to 50 feet as long as it was designed to look natural.  Of course this is vague on purpose as some of the oldsters on the board want the ability to simply say "nope", not natural enough.

But I was shocked.  Without evening mentioning parity act we now how in our CCR's the ability to mount a 25 foot small foot print antenna on our homes.  a vertical would qualify.  If you want to go to 50' you have to submit a design.

The sad thing is after all of this work we had the lawyer review it and presented it for approval to our residents for our annual meeting.  We didn't have enough people show up to pass it.  So we have to try again.

So my point is simply that I'm in a unique situation where I was able to get things changed.  Once we get it passed then it will open up a bunch of opportunities.   Without a doubt there will be no Texas Tower erected in our neighborhood but you'd be surprised....

Our CC&R's also prohibit "out buildings" like small sheds, yet we have some 12 of them in the neighborhood.  At least 3 of these were erected by people that just blew off the CC&Rs.  When the subject came up it was decided it would be too expensive to fight so we just let it go.  This probably would have been different if there had been just 1.  But with 12 we were fighting a losing battle.

Anyway, I am for the parity act if for no other reason than to open peoples eyes to the fact that things can and often should be changed.

Kevin

This is an ugly subject for a product forum. The Parity Act is well advertised in more general forums where devolving into unrelated subjects is more acceptable. I say this as an apology for joining in at this point knowing full well my opinion is off topic and maybe not well accepted.

HOAs are evil.

They turn neighbors against neighbors. They invade the sanctity of land and home ownership. They contribute to the collective (or maybe just a few) in the one place where being somewhat selfish should be acceptable. They take freedoms away. They are unavoidable in many cases and exclusive in all cases. And we pay money to them to fund their control. Just another tax.

HOAs are evil.

Ken - NM9P

RRR on follow the money and lazy lawyers and legislatures... It is easy to claim "it will destroy property values." In order to justify "aesthetic" snobbery. While I would not want someone opening up a junkyard or creating "rusty car sculpture" next to me, many CC&R's, HOA's, zoning boards, and planning commissions have replaced science and data with their own snobbery and private power trips. Many of these restrictions are state or contractual enforcement of paid monopolies. Forcing someone to purchase a product (TV or radio reception) that is freely obtainable via the public airways, seems to me to be an unconstitutional infringement of individual rights in order to support crony capitalism. Just because you were able to convince or bribe public officials or contractors to support it doesn't make it right. Luckily, I live in the Midwest where there are still some communities that have more reasonable restrictions. Though this is changing as the trend for greater conformity to the prejudices and control of others seems to continue.

Ria

One of my colleagues lives in a HOA neighborhood. He lives just outside of Tampa, FL. He wanted to convert his garage to a home office since he works from home. This is inside his home not visible from the street. The HOA told him no. Apparently the developer sold higher end homes that had space for a home office and didn't want people buying the cheaper model and upgrading on his own. He did it anyway and who's really going to notice. As much as I like decorating and stuff some of the restrictions are a bit much. Drapes have to be a certain color, colors have to be approved and styles of doors and windows. We live in a non HOA neighborhood (obviously) now and I haven't seen much out of the ordinary except for one guy who painted his door pink, but it doesn't really bother me or anyone else.

Lionel

Contact by Sen. Cornyn (TX) this morning.  They are wordsmithing in the Senate Commerce and Technology Committee.  It may never get out of committee as they debate how broad "reasonable accommodation" will be interpreted by the FCC.  Feels like dilution coming...if it survives in committee.

Let me apologize for posting the subject initially but decisions such as these in DC directly impact my enjoyment of the hobby and dampens my motivation to spend many thousands on new gear; it's depressing on so many levels.  May be for others as well. 

Ok, that's what I know this morning and now y'all know.

Enough of this use of bandwidth, I have done what I can. 

Back to Flex tech talk, always useful and interesting.

KY6LA_Howard

@LIonel Thank you very much for keeping us up to date on this very important topic that affects perhaps a majority. Of hams Please do not feel the need to apologize as many of us are interested.