STeve Andre' wrote:
First, it would seem to me that correctly spelling Robert McGwier's name would add substance to your cause. Certainly the lack of it detracts.
Your statements, even if completely accurate could not be the whole truth--any project consuming hundreds of hours of time is a complex task, with problems and decisions along the way. I am not a party to the events you are talking of, but your presentation leaves a lot to be desired. Rather than crab, explain. Venting here does little to solve anything except raise the heat to light ratio, all to common on mailing lists.
--STeve Andre' wb8wsf en82
Folks. I do not need a defense (if any of this was meant as one) and the correct spelling of my name is sufficiently different from the usual that I don't even notice the misspelling of it anymore. I knew who the individual was talking about. My family jokes that some ancestor forgot how to spell (or never knew is the more likely explanation!). I would ask that anyone who is in agreement with the individuals contention that I am evil incarnate, please write the AMSAT bod at bod@amsat.org. There is no originality on the individuals part in that thesis and the support of that hypothesis will not be the last. Given history, I suspect I will still be here when the individual has long since given up the vengeful quest. Anyone who is in disagreement with the individual ABOUT ME, just drop it altogether. Anyone that wants to discuss what little of the content merits discussion, stay tuned. The writings have raised some pertinent issues however and I will discuss them here to the best of my limited abilities.
Having been awarded every single major technical award that I know of and many I didn't know about in amateur radio says that I have fooled the entire world or I must be doing something right. I leave that to you to decide. I do not work for awards and I do not ask for them. To me, they just happen because I always seem to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to get involved. I am happy to get them because they are ALWAYS based on team work. I am a gregarious, even communal kind of fellow and I take partnerships further than almost anyone I know. ALL of my close friends are people who have partnered with me for almost a lifetime. I have many of them and I keep them because while I do not withhold criticism to spare their feelings, I always stand right next to them to find the solution. The ones that remain are friends forever. That said, it is a responsibility that if you find fault, to help find the answer. This is what many of you, and the individual in particular seem to have forgotten. It is my single greatest personal asset and attribute. I live for the interaction and exchange.
That I have been awarded many of the nation's highest possible awards as a civilian working for the U.S. government says that I am a trusted individual making valuable contributions. At work, to put it mildly, I am a BMOC. I have been attacked by much worse than the invidual and, just as before, I will be standing when they are long gone because I do not do things to serve myself. My father was the single greatest example a man could have to learn how to live a life. I can be argumentative and even frustrated but when the argument is over, it is over and I move on. Any personal success in amateur radio and at work is achieved PRIMARILY by building TEAMS and then gaining the fiercest possible loyalty from the people that work with me because I ALWAYS give away credit to them. Take any speech for any award I have ever given and the content is simple "Thank you for the award and I accept it on behalf of the team that got me here." I then thank the individuals who inspired me to do the work I have been lucky enough to be involved in. I do not do this to be artful. I just realize day in, and day out, I am a person who works best in groups, I use my strengths and I NEVER try to do what I am not good at without saying I am not good at it and thanking those who did the pieces I am not good at doing. I always climb on the shoulders of others and I never fool myself that it is otherwise. Enough about me. The individual has not hurt my feelings. The individual is simply not important enough to hurt my feelings. His significance to me is strictly limited at this point to those valid issues raised and the fact that he has clearly demonstrated that we are failing at telling a story.
The continued pursuit of this open tit-for-tat in the AMSAT-BB is detrimental to AMSAT. I am regularly tempted to do what some of my fellow board members have done and that is unsubscribe to AMSAT-BB altogether. The shutting down of AMSAT-BB completely barely misses a affirmative vote every time it comes up (which happens more and more often). I hope this does not happen. I have opposed it as throwing out the baby with the bath water just because the baby "could not wait and the water is nasty". I believe that we need to answer incorrect statements passed off as fact and on occasion (a rarer occurrence than it used to be) a diamond comes out of the rough. I will bring up some facts as I see them and deal with them in the order that comes up in my mind.
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This latest incident came about because an individual decided to violate the most basic principle of net etiquette. An email that was sent privately to the primary recipient and the board of directors of AMSAT, was transmitted to the entire world. Therefore, the individual transmitting the note is PERSONALLY responsible for any insult that has been given senior citizens in general and amateur radio in particular. The former contributor in question has become so angry and disenchanted with AMSAT leadership that any disagreement is taken as a personal affront. The threshold for going off like a bomb has become lower and lower. Once we had a moderately valuable volunteer who took forever to deliver anything at all. The utility to the organization has now been overcome by the bull in a china shop approach to perceived insults. Believe me, when this note is done, you will know that this started at a much lower volume, and in a much calmer way than where it has landed.
As to the content of my private violated confidence, there are several facts in evidence that need to be observed about the current situation amateur radio in general and AMSAT in particular finds we are facing. The demographics of our population is just plain awful. The projections are basically catastrophic. I am frustrated that I do not see truly wealthy and/or influential individuals stepping up to fight hard for the long term survival of amateur radio. I know of ONE that is really swinging hard to the best of his ability while leading a very busy life (Joe Walsh). There should be hundreds who owe the entire trajectory of their lives to amateur radio stepping up and helping change the outcome. These many individuals need to take a long look in the mirror and at their careers and ask themselves how much amateur radio did for them. I can give you the name of a handful of teachers, with a tiny amount of support put who amateur radio classes into their curriculum in school by arguing that it shows many different aspects to students from technical to public service and more. With modest resources, this could be done all over the country. The necessary individuals need to ask why they are not giving back. The ARRL is doing what it can do with the resources it has and the leadership we have elected. The ARRL (and amateur radio) need the help of individuals who are capable of bringing in THOUSANDS of new hams to revitalize our hobby and take it in new directions. It needs to be done soon or we are doomed. It is just that simple. The metaphor I chose to demonstrate this in a personal private email was not intended as an insult to anyone but an attempt to answer a person who has become irrational on certain subjects and has taken what he perceives as personal insults (not delivered by me) and turn them into a fight with the organization he purports to support by attacking the individuals that the membership of AMSAT has voted to run its organization.
AMSAT leadership is looking DIRECTLY at the demographics. When I see these attack notes about "THOSE GUYS IN AMSAT ARE STUPID" or "THOSE GUYS IN AMSAT ARE LAZY AND INCOMPETENT" or "THOSE GUYS ARE EVIL" or "THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT ME", I get angry and then I get philosophical. But let me say in our look at where we are, we are not swayed by emotion on this matter. We have the facts at our disposal because we sought them dispassionately. We are not losing membership primarily because of lack of HEO satellites (though this is indeed a contributing factor). We are not losing membership because the technical people in AMSAT have gotten weak. Go check out any project in amateur radio where interesting or new things are being pursued. You will find at least one well known AMSAT person involved AND influential in the endeavor. Amateur radio has the LEADING authorities in many areas contributing directly. Then what do we as AMSAT board members see happening? We see exactly what the ARRL sees. We see the aging and the attrition it causes leading inexorably to the end of our piece of the hobby (and the hobby in general) in the U.S. and similar places. We seeing our technical and user parts getting increasingly thin and lacking depth. If AMSAT does not turn this around by finding NEW members (not renewing old members), we will be unable to face the inexorable march towards the insufficiency of our membership to support the very existence of the organization. This means that we need to balance attraction to new with service to the old and I do not mean age though that is a contributing factor. It is absolutely irresponsible to build a resource that we will have on orbit for 15 years ,if we are given a go, to serve a population that will be greater than HALF dead at the end of that time. That is a harsh calculation, but it is just the facts ma'am. I used a frustrated sentence at the end of a long exchange that began with others and wound up with me after I had had enough silliness and I undermined my own position with the rhetoric. The previous paragraph contains the real message without the frustration of dealing with the individuals intransigence (he's hard headed) and the perceived (but not real) insults to his volunteer labor.
Amateur Radio in general and AMSAT in particular faces a serious decline in members in the next three decades. The statistics are so clear that you would have to be hiding under a rock not to see. The AMSAT leadership is trying to address its long term survival. Two more AO-40 campaigns and there will be NO ONE LEFT to use them. Is that clear enough? We cannot serve the dwindling graying membership by allowing the organization to die. We need new members because it is irresponsible to serve only those individuals that are currently members.
I returned from a 13 year absence and began my return very quietly indeed. At that time I had been back in amateur radio period for two years following the release of the Flex Radio SDR-1000. I had to have my arm twisted to come to a meeting in Orlando in 2004 to deal with Eagle. Yes, believe it or not, I was absent from AMSAT from 1991 to 2004. And though it may seem like I have been here forever, my return to AMSAT is in its third year. It was clear to me even then that many things had happened in my absence. We have fantastic volunteers. They are simply amazing. In the face of a serious and devastating blow in the life of AO-40 and that project, we still had very valuable people giving of themselves to our cause. It also became clear that there was no serious system engineering going on. There was lots of talk about "we need this and we need that" and there was no serious study of the implications of the "we need" to the bottom line: build a satellite to serve a community that would insure the long term survival of the organization and certainly we had not addressed any way to increase the technical health of the organization.
I suggested we consider doing a software radio transponder. I gave arguments as to why it should be done. I was not in a leadership position at all then. I had no real horse in the race and I was completely uncommitted to taking on large pieces of the AMSAT responsibilities again. An individual, who is a tremendously gifted and talented manager, was given responsibility for Eagle. The person was not chosen by the Vice President for Engineering (I was just returning remember and not in that position) and there was absolutely ZERO small satellite space experience. I viewed this as Mission Impossible but I was determined to help. I went right on doing my software radio work since it was directly applicable. I made many new friends that AMSAT needed and they have since been recruited to help us. Two years and two months ago (yes, that is all) I was asked to accept the VP Engineering role. It took me a month to say yes. My friends were telling me I was crazy and I knew they were right but AMSAT gave my entire life its direction and I wanted to help. I've made a complete life "doing what Tom Clark told me to do". I went to Pittsburgh in October 2005 in our emergency "annual meeting" and was made VEEP E. I took six months to get my legs underneath me but I knew the answer to many questions shortly after the New Year.
I did what any decent system engineer would do (which is what the VPE is in this organization. He is the overall systems manager, not the designer of each piece). I asked myself what services are we trying to deliver? What are the requirements on the payloads to deliver these services? I did my analysis and I presented my conclusions to the organization. It gave us a stark choice. They could scale back our desired set of services and totally give up on supporting a new class of member or they could change the satellite. There was simply no choice.
The basics of the analysis are easily understandable by anyone when presented correctly. I was so shocked that this level of analysis had not been done that I was (unusually) reticent about pushing it forward. I was entirely too timid for my nature. Dick Jansson is a close personal friend and we have known each other for over 30 years and worked closely together over a span of over 20 years. He is tremendously valuable to us. His entire life's contributions to this organization is deserving of a medal. Nevertheless, my friendship with this man I have known forever could not keep me from fulfilling my responsibilities to the organization. In the note you are in receipt of, the implication is that I decided to throw Dick's work out in a fit of ego. Thank you Steve for realizing that in the calm of logic, there had to be more to it than this.
Leaving out the people who had made the critical mistakes, I called ONLY communications engineers and those who had been directly responsible for delivering communications electronics systems together in a meeting hosted for us by our long time member, Franklin Antonio, in San Diego. We discovered that one of the greatest recruits we have had in a long time was 30 years old and was not just some friend I had brought in on a whim. We flew Jan King in from Australia. Never let it be said that I fear having tough experienced peers reviewing my work. I welcome it. Matt and I had been discussing what Eagle needed to look like for six months by June of 2006. Matt is one of these FANTASTIC technical friends you rarely make in a life. He is like Tom Clark. He never lets friendship get in the way of a good technical argument. He argues forcefully, carefully, rationally and he ONLY cares about what is technically right or wrong. Both of them are nobody's yes men. They are the kind of people that you should ALWAYS surround yourself with unless you have a truly failed ego structure. Matt led our thinking for the entire weekend and we came to a firm conclusion based on cold hard calculation.
We needed twice as much power and more antenna than the cube Eagle could deliver. This paper has been on the AMSAT web site in Eaglepedia for 1.4 years. Jim Sanford made no secret whatsoever of its contents.
In addition, it was clear that we were NOT getting on an Ariane. We MIGHT get to GTO but not in a useful orbit. Here is where experience and good intuition brought about with years of experience and calculation on these matters. We were scared to death of rocket motors. If you mentioned motor to AMSAT people who were involved before, the pucker factor would go up so much that I thought of getting AMSAT a lifetime supply of Exlax.
So I told the organization several things. We could throw off everything, and I did mean everything, that made Eagle new and we could even scale back on what Eagle was going to deliver on the "old" or
a) we had to have a motor b) we had to have larger antennas c) we had to have more solar panels
Given that we needed a motor to get on a much more likely U.S. launcher as a secondary payload, the spacecraft had to be stable enough to support a high rate of spin and support the burning of the motor. Furthermore, the magnetorque design of the cube was coupled through the inertial dampers so badly on the cube Eagle frame that it would take WEEKS to turn the spacecraft and have it stabilize.
I take it that by now, you realize, I am not an idiot. I did not do this out of ego or malice. We made a choice. At that the time, we could throw ALL of our weight behind P3E or do a different Eagle. I took NO position on this. I supported P3E and I have risked my personal situation considerably in so doing. I spent hours and hours and successfully brought up IPS-32 for the first time on the IHU-3. I have been the leading board member in support of our involvement in P3E and I managed to overcome the feelings left by AO-40 to do the good job for our members. The entire board has argued this forcefully and while it is NOT unanimous, the organization supports P3E with our money and our limited talents.
The organization was not emotionally prepared to abandon what was Eagle altogether. We knew that Karl was coming to the end of his career. There was some doubt as to the day to day survival of the ZEL. AMSAT-DL has a clear tradition of not making these kinds of internal decisions and matters available to even those who should be considered its partners. We were left simply without a single choice. We could not abandon our own efforts and then hit our knees and pray that P3E would survive the end of the ZEL and Karl's tenure. We have helped our friends in AMSAT-UK and AMSAT-DL keep the ZEL functioning while the satellite is finished. Go look at the record of the board meetings. I made EVERY motion in support of this. My fellow board members, being persons of good intention, listen to the arguments and supported this. It was not always unanimous but it was done.
So, given that state of affairs: a complete re-engineering of the spacecraft was done. I will now tell all of the facts. Matt Ettus and I did the calculations and design in January of 2006 sitting at the table of Eric Blossom, K7GNU in Reno, Nev. A good manager makes it his teams decision to do things. Since I KNEW the answer because Matt and I screamed at each other for days until we knew, I just kept asking the right questions and all tumbled to the right answer. That helped smooth the hurt feelings in EVERY CASE with one exception. We are dealing with that one exception now. Every single argument given to the offended individual has been ignored. We have asked that work be done by the incensed individual and when we found that the work would not meet the exigencies of our current situation, we apologized for the work being done and rejected it but assured the individual the contribution was valuable. The result has been ad hominem vituperation and played out everywhere. The hard decision that the work would not meet our engineering needs has met with the harsh criticism that sounds to me a whole lot like "How dare you not consider building your entire project to suit what I have done rather than decide what the project actually needs".
I have dealt with VERY difficult choices in the last two years. I had to change the direction of an organization based on cold hard calculation after it had gone down a road without adequate guidance for years. We have tried so hard we have literally broken down and nearly cried at times over how frustrating it is to even get an audience with organizations who can lift us to orbit. We received the news of P4 Lite from Lee McLamb and we have jumped ALL over it. The ball is not in our court. We are doing technical work that will be shared between Eagle and P4 Lite while we await responses and action items ACCEPTED by Intelsat. We are awaiting the outcome impatiently. I have made engineering management DECISIONS supported by the organization through the granting of my budget for 2008 that we are going to take a risk and assume the Intelsat opportunity will proceed. Frankly, I do not know how to do otherwise at this point.
The organization needs restructuring. The executive team knows this. Rick has been proactive in preparing the organization to move out with new opportunities which seem to be running over us in waves at last. We have serious marketing directors. We have engaged serious IT help. We have a serious fund raising PROFESSIONAL organization who did a very detailed study for us and then told us to wait on the outcome of the negotiations with Intelsat before making final fund raising decisions. We are not asleep. What we are is many super over worked individuals who have lives and we are sitting on top of one of the greatest technical organizations any of us have ever been involved with but it has insufficient depth. THIS NEEDS NEW BLOOD. I do not fear new blood, I desperately want to recruit my own replacement. This is not a life long dream. It is a thing I want to recruit my way out of.
I am burned out on this conversation. This is all I can give it until the next time an individual thinks they are more important than the good of the organization and choose to defecate all over it by targeting half truths, innuendo, release of private conversations, etc. to try and target the people who have made hard decisions.
This is my last note on this. I do it because I love AMSAT and I do not understand why you do not.
Bob