Hello, First: I want to thank every one that supported me through some very trying times.
Second: Some members of Amsat have suggested to me that they plan on holding out membership renewal and donations. I do not condone that action as of yet. 75% of the members, volunteers and officers of Amsat are a great bunch of dedicated people who want only to please the members and are great to work with. With the goal of getting some birds in the sky for Amsat members and the general ham community at large. To punish them would do no service to them and the Amsat members and ham radio at large.
As any corporation Amsat does from time to time need to clean house and through out the trash. In my opinion the first and worse case is that of Robert McQwier. As vice president of engineering Bob has been a total failure. In example he allowed Dick Jansen to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours designing Eagle and then coming up with a new design so every thing has to start from day one. In my case he had me spend in the neighborhood of three hundred hours on a very difficult module design to manufacture. To truly manufacture these parts they should have been done with custom forming dies costing upwards off $20.000.00 each. I did manage to do the job by designing and building a custom sheet metal brake. Only to have Bob decide they will not work. When in the very beginning I suggested the design that he now has on the drawing board. I could go on and on but think this is enough. To work for him, just read the email I have included with this post and let your imagination go to work for you. No wonder Amsat has trouble finding volunteers and donors. As it stands now Eagle is behind from when I started. Amsat has lost the full services of Dick Jansen over this fiasco and as present I do not know of any one who has replaced him. Bob Davis is doing some of the work but does not have enough time devote to get it done promptly.
The final straw is his slandering and degrading of senior citizens members of Amstat. No organization can tolerate such an attitude and expect to survive.
I suggest all members of Amsat to contact the board of directors concerning this matter and giving them your opinion. Then we volunteers and others can get together and get some birds in the sky in any form that is decided on. Myself I am chomping at the bit to get to work.
Thanks Again Fred KF0AK
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert McGwier" rwmcgwier@gmail.com To: "Fred A Parker" fparker@paulbunyan.net Cc: "'AMSAT BoD'" bod@amsat.org; "senior-officers" Senior-officers@amsat.org Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 1:14 PM Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Re: Phase 4 versus Eagle
Fred A Parker wrote:
Just a suggestion, Has Amsat explored the idea of hiring a professional to help in some of the day to management and fund raising? When Amsat has a potential consumer base of 700,000 hams. If things were done right money should be no problem. Amsat needs to do a better job of selling itself. Then money should be no problem. Fred
Not only have we considered it Fred but you continue to demonstrate your ignorance and hostility by not knowing that we have done exactly that. You do not know that all sorts of efforts have been made at raising funds. We are told at every step what basic axioms there are in fund raising. You have to have something to sell to the interested party.
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No one is interesting in funding a private repeater for 20 guys to talk to each other about their brand new scars and brand new meds and we would be FOOLS to kowtow to people who will be dead or uninterested before we get into orbit.
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We have a professional fund raiser hired and
contracted. We have a professional manager who is doing a DAMN GOOD job, better than when I was a director 15 years ago.
It really is time for you to basically shut up and go do some investigation before you make a further complete fool of yourself. Barry asked me if I was shooting the messenger on an unpleasant message. I have made a very successful career out of promoting and working with unpleasant messengers. I have never promoted a single one who fired all cannons in a public forum with wrong facts, open hostility, and just plain dumb ignorance.
Really Fred, you are well over the line. This is personal, ad hominem, and of no utility to the organization you ostensibly support.
Bob
-- AMSAT Director and VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR WG Chair “An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?” Descartes