Please support the "Homeowners Wireless Freedom Act of 2018"

the neighbor would just as easily complain about the radio interference than to spend money on newer stuff, as there will be NO guarantee, the the interference will stop.

 

Dx engineering makes a tilt over base that works well if you want to run a vertical dipole. You just stand it up in about two seconds, talk as long as you want, then lay it back down.

 

Up periscope. "Fire!" Down periscope.

 

I have had dealings, thankfully never as a resident, with quite a few HOA Presidents and boards. Had quite a few friends who were unfortunate enough to have resided in HOA controlled neighborhoods, too. Those suggesting crank-up towers and such don't sound as though they have had a lot of experience with the control-freakism mindset that is found in most of these organizations. These people want to control the color of your house, the type grass in your yard, the color and type flowers around your house, even what is painted on your car or work vehicle and whether or not you can park it overnight in your driveway. Psychologically speaking, one word describes these control freaks, "anal". The moment you try putting a crank-up or fold-over tower in your back yard, they will be all over you, telling you that you cannot do such and if you try, that you will deal with their lawyers, at your expense.

I will sign the OP's petition as these boards are seriously out of control in most places. Gullible people believe they need the HOA to "keep our property values up", yet probably pay many times more in regime fees to the HOA than they would have ever lost because someone in the neighborhood let the grass get a couple of inches longer than normal while they were exceptionally busy at work or taking care of a sick family member.

HOA's are like another level of government. They take your money to use on stuff THEY think it needs to be spent on, and tell you what you can and cannot do with YOUR property. In many areas, the basic "evils" they "protect" you from such as trash in yards, junk cars, etc, are already covered by municipal or county ordinances. I was a cop who had a large HOA-controlled neighborhood in my area. While they were quick to swoop down on residents for heinous offenses such as grass a couple of inches longer than normal, overnight parking in the (plenty wide) street in front if their home, painting the window shutters an un-approved color, or having an "ugly" radio or tv antenna (seriously?) on their home, they didn't care one bit about the long-suffering neighbors of the idiot with the big dogs in his garage that barked and howeled all night, nor the family of the juvenile delinquent who used his family's home as a staging area and command center for him and his thuggish little friends to plan and execute burglaries, auto-breakings, and vandalism from. We (cops) would bust em and the juvenile courts would release them back to their families, who just let them do more of the same. I would rather live next door to someone with grass 3' high, shutters all painted different non-matching colors, and a functioning rustbucket parked in the drive than either of the above, any day of the week!

Most HOA boards are made up of little wannabe Castro's, Hitler's, Idi Amin's, and Hillary Clinton's who for whatever reason, just couldn't get elected to school board or higher office so they found another way to make people give them money and then use that money to tell them what they can or cannot do with their own property.

 

Good post but I have to point out those suggestions from people who don't have to deal with an hoa are honest suggestions from people who will not put themselves into a position of buying a house with an hoa attached. When I got married, I told my wife two things I will not ever do in my life, one is live in a trailer park (not slamming those who do but where my sister lived, it was really bad) and the other is I will never buy property with an hoa involved, I told her refuse to be dictated to by anyone with my property and would live in a motor home in a truck stop before buying property with an hoa. My uncle owned a home in an affluent area where everything has an hoa, he had a nightmare with an issue with his neighbor spying on his wife, so he wanted to put up a green fence but he wasn't allowed. He had the cops involved even video taped the guy but when the guy complained to the board about my uncles behavior, they got in my uncles case about harassing the neighbor.

 

I am with you Ridgeline! I hate badly to use that ("never") word because most of my life when I did, I wound up eating it within a year or so. That said, I am fully with you about (you know) living in any HOA neighborhood. I lived in a trailer park once, right after I married my first wife and it was quite an adventure as you might guess. I would live in another trailer park before I would live in a HOA neighborhood. I feel for those who got sucked into buying HOA homes because as some have said, there just aren't many new homes being built anymore that don't have membership in one of these abominations as a requirement to purchase a home. Add a wife who is charmed (brainwashed) by the exterior design, landscaping, clubhouse, etc, and a lot guys don't have a chance. I used to watch the houses under construction whenever they destroyed a new patch of forest to build more houses, crowded together on tiny little postage stamp lots. $1K, $2K, $3K+, houses, made out of some of the flimsiest materials imaginable, then you get to be governed by a bunch of control freaks who take money from you at increasingly higher rates than city, county, state, or Federal, governments together did. It really has to be bad not being into radio, then buying one of these homes only to get into ham or CB, then find out about the antenna restrictions.

 

HOA's can be little bannana republics, but if your neighborhood doesn't have one you will inevitably wind up with a neighbor who has a junk yard for a front lawn, or pink paint on his house, or a corn field growing next to the drive way. Having an HOA does maintain the resale value of your home, and HOA's do prevent some of the more annoying things people inflict on their neighbors. HOS's can sometimes be useful too. For instance, back when the Post Office started requiring centralized neighborhood mail boxes in my area the developer that built my neighborhood simply included a provision in the HOA covenants forbidding this and requiring a mail box in front of every house.

As I see it, there are two problems with HOA's in my state. They can sue you and by law they automatically get to recover their legal fees from you. That encourages a lot of frivolous litigation. And developers tend to simply cut and paste covenants from one project to another so the bad provisions (like no HAM antennas) never get weeded out.