In 1968 I had a long-running correspondence with the RSGB over the IARU
adoption of what was then the "QRA Locator"; later to become the
"Maidenhead" locator. QRA was first proposed for amateur use by a Czech
amateur OK1VR in 1958 and was subsequently adopted by amateurs in all the
Warsaw Pact countries. I believe it originated in a USSR military locator
system already well understood by them. The Western (NATO) counterpart was
the GEOREF system which I described in an RSGB Bulletin article in 1968. The
RSGB VHF committee at the time were, somewhat amazingly, unaware of GEOREF
and thought that QRA was a totally amateur invention. When I started pushing
for GEOREF, a more logical, accurate and simpler system, I was more or less
told to keep quiet and stop rocking the boat since the IARU were going for
QRA and that was that. The rest, as they say, is history. I forecast at the
time that QRA would never have the accuracy required for accurate contest
scoring and that's why Maidenhead has become so needlessly complicated. We
could also have gone for the well-established world-wide UTM grid but I
suppose that would have been too easy. It's all too late to do anything now,
of course, but I have never met a professional geodesist who understands why
we need Maidenhead. .
Walter G3JKV.
|
