The April 2012 edition of RadCom, the RSGB's monthly magazine, carries breathless announcements of a surplus - yes, you read it right - of £88,000 this year.
I will be the first to say 'well done' to the Interim Board, who, though a bit slow on data protection issues last year, at least got a good grip on the crisis that had beset the society in earlier years.
What, then, should we do with £88,000? The RSGB itself sees investing in member services important. I don't agree. You see, if you invest in member services when your membership is on the slide, then all you are doing is building a palace for a dying king.
OK, I'm sure we could do with better services for our sub, but in all practical senses, most members just expect the magazine every month, and very little else.
I also suspect that, if you caught most members on a pensive moment whilst they had a quiet cup of coffee, they would agree with the notion of foregoing their own member benefits in aid of getting more youngsters into radio; the last thing any of us wants to see is amateur radio coming to an end.
So, RSGB, maybe give the present lot of members not much more than they expect for the time being, and spend the £88,000 on the future of amateur radio. With commercial sponsors, who also have no interest in seeing their customer base dwindle, we could probably add a fair few thousand to that figure and look at a radios-in-schools programme; a simple top of head calculation shows you could immediately buy about 190 basic HF sets for schools, PSUs and antennas not accounted for, and hope that at least a few out of a couple of hundred pupils might eventually go on to become operators and members.
Now that would be a really good use of money! If anything remotely like it actually happens, I shall do something spectacular for charity.
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