Time for a Single License Class
Lean in close here and let me whisper a secret in your ear…
Since upgrading to Extra class many years ago, I haven’t paid the slightest bit of attention to the US amateur radio licensing process. I know, it sounds perfectly awful. I’ve never volunteered to be a VE, and heck, if a total stranger asked me what they needed to do in order to obtain a license today, I would have to look that up for them. I suppose that since I know that I never have to take another licensing test, I’ve completely tuned out of the process.
Does that make me a bad ham?
I’ve been licensed since the 1970s and for good or for bad, incentive licensing was tattooed into my DNA. I have held every class of license that was available during my tenure (Novice, Technician, General, Advanced, Extra) with the exception of the Conditional class license.
Back in those days, if you desired anything other than a Novice license you had to travel to a nearby FCC Field Office that offered testing about once every 90 days. Best I recall, the "Conditional" license conferred General Class privileges but the testing was done locally by two Extra class hams — the idea being that this was a convenience for handicapped individuals or those who legitimately had no way to travel to an FCC Field Office.
The concept behind incentive licensing was that each level of license would come with more operating privileges, that was earned by gradually tougher licensing requirements. My amateur life began when I passed a Novice exam given in the home of a local ham. A few weeks later I was issued WD9GCT and I spent the next year patrolling the Novice segments of 80, 40 and 15 meters with an HW-16 transceiver, matching VFO, and a dipole that I installed so close to the high-voltage power lines that ran along the north end of my parents home that some nights I still wake up in a cold sweat dreaming about it.
But this was the 70s and the local radio club had become obsessed with FM repeaters. That was all they ever talked about in meetings and I couldn’t help but notice that 73, CQ, and QST were all pushing FM repeaters like a Baptist minister pushes salvation. It didn’t take long for me to catch the fever and suddenly my Novice license and modest HF station seemed rather cheesy so I upgraded to Technician (N9AVG), bought a brand new Regency HR2B (rock bound FM transceiver), and installed a 2 meter Ringo Ranger ten feet from those same high-voltage lines.
Apparently, upgrading to Technician made me no wiser about personal safety…
I held that Technician license for about a year when a very good friend of mine, who was also one of my high school teachers, decided to retire and move to Arkansas. He made this decision months ahead of actually moving so we made plans … I would upgrade to General. He never took a shine to CW so I decided to become an HF phone operator so we could stay in touch despite the long-distance that would be between us.
That was the toughest radio exam I have ever taken. I had to appear on the appointed day and time at a Federal court house in downtown Indianapolis. There must have been a hundred of us sitting stiffly at long wooden tables. The instructions for copying the code were given — five minutes of random text would be sent at 13WPM. We were to write down everything that we could copy, and then what we wrote down would be examined and one consecutive minute of perfect copy had to be found in order to pass.
Otherwise, it was a long trip back home and a 90 day wait for another shot at it.
The examiner used a 33rpm record player that had a large speaker in the front of the room. He plopped the needle on the record and the exam was underway. You think you’ve copied code through rough conditions — try being a kid worried if you had put enough change in the parking meter while trying to copy 13 words per minute of random text from a loudspeaker in a big hollow room that made even the slightest sound a loud echo.
Having survived that ordeal, I had to face the written exam but by comparison that was a piece of cake. The big payoff came from the relief I felt while driving home as a General class operator and thinking about the many SSB QSOs I would soon have.
Woot!
Years later, another friend had started meeting five nights a week with several of his friends in the Advanced portion of the band. Not wanting to be left out of the group, I upgraded to Advanced and shortly thereafter to Extra.
See how this incentive licensing stuff worked? Each time I wanted more privileges I upgraded, which was exactly how the ARRL intended it when they conceived of the notion back in the 50’s. But now we find ourselves in the 21st century. Morse tests have gone the way of the horse and buggy and only three classes of license remain. Ham testing is done locally by other hams who volunteer to do such things, and you can simply keep taking the test over and over again, on the same day (so long as the VEs are willing to keep doing it), until you pass.
So let me just say this out loud … why don’t we simply go to a single class of license that conveys all amateur privileges and be done with it?
If there is some justification for multi-tiered amateur licensing, beyond simply hazing, it completely escapes me.
The tired old argument that a newcomer might accidentally venture into an emergency net on HF is enough baloney to perpetually stock a delicatessen. 95% of all emergency communication provided by amateur radio takes place on FM repeaters. If this argument ever had a leg to stand on, then access to FM repeaters should have always been limited to Extra class operators; and yet it wasn’t. In fact now all VHF/UHF privileges are granted to the most basic class (Technician) of licensee.
I can almost hear Old DX Dawg saying that these new whippersnappers would wreak havoc in those precious slices of Extra class spectrum in the "most important" bands. But seriously, let’s cut the crap. There are already plenty of Extra class LIDs making more than enough trouble from 14.000 to 14.025 as it is so a special license class is a fairly crappy LID filter.
Besides, do you really believe that a brand new ham who doesn’t know enough Morse to call ‘CQ’ is going to venture down there anyway?
The only legitimate argument I can see against the creation of a single class, winner take all, ham license is that it would slash the market (and resulting revenue) from those who sell license materials for multiple classes. It would probably also cause some consternation for those local radio clubs/puppy mills who have perfected the path to ‘Technician’ into a four hour Saturday morning ‘cram’ session.
I’ve no doubt missed something else, but you’re going to have to jump in here and tell me what it is. But please offer something substantive. Maintaining the status quo for the sake of tradition is worthless.
Tradition frequently needs a swift kick in the testicles just to keep the hobby lurching forward.
In: blog · Tagged with: arrl, ideas, license
AO-51’s Close Shave
I saw this note from AMSAT North America Vice President of Operations Drew Glasbrenner on the mailing list a few days ago detailing just how close the AO-51 satellite came to realizing its true kinetic potential when it zipped within one half-mile of another fast moving low-earth-orbit bird.
“I just received a message from the US Joint Space Operations Center warning that AO-51 will have a close approach to another satellite, FORMOSAT 3-D, tomorrow morning at 1056 UTC. This just happens to be over the Eastern US.”
It turned out that the pass was actually closer than anticipated, but the popular satellite survived the near miss without so much as working up a sweat…
In: blog · Tagged with: amsat
Beans and Cornbread
My Dad was born in 1927, my Mom in ‘32 — children of the Great Depression. They learned some things about that hard scrabble life that they passed along. One of them being how to extend one dinner into two, and sometimes two and a lunch.
Monday was laundry day at our house; and it was also the night when Mom made a big pot of ham and beans. She always put the beans on the stove in the morning, allowing them to cook all day long while she focused on the laundry. It may sound bourgeois’ but we considered a pot of ham and beans with cornbread and fried potatoes to be just south of culinary heaven.
Truth be told, I still believe that to be true.
I suppose that a bag of Great Northern Beans was cheap; as was a hunk of ham, cornmeal, and five pounds of potatoes peeled and fried in a skillet of Crisco. Mom used a large pot for the beans and after the five of us ate until we were full, there were always leftover beans.
The half-empty pot was put in the refrigerator until Thursday night when it would be resurrected. Mom would add several cups of water and a pile of hand-rolled flat dumplings to the mix. This brought the pot back up to full and Thursday night dinner became beans and dumplings, and if we were lucky, some leftover cornbread.
Leftover cornbread was fairly rare since my Dad had this nasty habit of crumbling up the last few pieces in a big glass of buttermilk to have while watching television in the evening. It left me with permanent dislike for buttermilk though I’ve read that this used to be fairly common…
I figure those ingredients didn’t cost even five dollars forty years ago, and they probably don’t cost much more than that now. It was two night’s dinner for the five of us and sometimes there was enough left for Friday lunch. I look back on it now as having been a stroke of fiscally conservative brilliance on the part of my Mother who turned such simple ingredients into so much good food.
And if you don’t think that’s very impressive, then I double dog dare you to feed your family twice this week for as much as fifty dollars, and then wait and see if one of your kids will still be talking about it forty years from now…
In: blog · Tagged with: family, food, life
Disappearing Ink
Best I can recall, and it’s been a really long time, I got my first instruction in cursive handwriting in about the third grade. I don’t remember it exactly, but it seems that first and second grade were spent learning to print numbers and the letters of the alphabet, while third grade began the arduous work on learning cursive.
I do remember it being rather difficult, and required a lot of practice. I also remember that the girls seemed much better at it than the boys; the same was true in art class which led me to conclude that cursive handwriting was more art than skill but the girls made it look pretty. The southpaws among us seemed better at it than most except for the propensity to have a backwards slant that perturbed our teacher almost as much as putting your mouth directly on the water fountain while getting a drink…
Anyway, by high school days everything was handwritten in cursive — from multi-page book reports to tests and we didn’t give it another thought. There simply was never a single school day when writing in cursive was not a requirement so we had plenty of practice and got reasonably good at it.
One of the elective courses in my high school was typing … but that seemed a fairly useless skill at the time unless it was your desire to become a secretary and not surprisingly, the class was mostly filled with females who took typing for one semester and shorthand for the other. It would be a few more years before we got a look at an electronic word processor and had the sudden epiphany about the future of personal computing and how efficient it might have been had we learned how to "touch" type in earlier days.
From that point the years passed quickly until I found myself working as a young engineer and doing a lot of drafting. Yes, I said drafting — not CAD work. I used one of those big slanted tables with the rubbery green backing material where I would attach a large sheet of white drafting paper, held in place with masking tape in the corners, and proceed to draw lines and shapes on it using a T-square.
I drew in pencil and a box of erasers was always at the ready and all were very well used.
The wording on such drawings was hand printed with a pencil. It was meticulous work considering that there was no "undo" option available. I had numerous tools that aided this effort — one was a plastic template like thing that had multiple "windows" of varying heights. The idea was that you would lay this on a drawing where needed and print the words inside those windows which forced all of the letters to be uniform in height.
After a year or so of this, my printed handwriting became so much better than my cursive writing that I stopped using cursive altogether, except when signing my signature. Fast forward another twenty years and now we use keyboards for everything which has completely obviated the need to write in cursive, at least for me, except where my signature is required (why do we still sign things in cursive?).
What brought all this to mind was an article I read a few days ago about how cursive handwriting was becoming extinct. Young people use their computers for school reports, email, Facebook, and text messaging. They have no need for cursive handwriting and consequently, it’s no longer being taught in many elementary schools.
"Balderdash and poppycock" thinks I, and so I proceeded to sit down with a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen and write a paragraph in my best cursive. Holy Crap! If my life depended on recognizable handwritten instructions in cursive, well, let’s just say I’d be dead. The finished product looked as though I had simultaneously twisted both knobs of an Etch-A-Sketch as fast as I could for several minutes. Thank Zeus I wasn’t home at the time or I might have been tempted to scan those mystical symbols and include that image here.
It was so bad, I had completely forgotten how to even form a capital ‘S’ using cursive!
Now, I don’t suppose that this portends the end of all civilization, but I do find it rather shocking how quickly I’ve lost this particular skill. And while there is little use for it in this modern day and age, I think I’m going to begin practicing handwriting a paragraph a day and see if it’s possible to get it back.
Lucky for you, gentle reader, this blog will never be a handwritten exercise…
In: blog · Tagged with: culture, skills, writing
Moral of the story
As usual, Dave is making good points…
“Think about how you’re treated by airlines. By insurance companies. If you have to go to a hospital. That’s the kind of relationship you have with Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. Sooner or later there will be a massive oil spill or a massive network-wide security breach. Expect these companies to be every bit as bad as the ones in other industries. Probably worse because they’ve come so far without much oversight or scrutiny. Recently Google was given permission to trade energy. Who are these companies? We have no idea.”
You’re paying attention to what he has to say, aren’t you?
In: blog · Tagged with: apple, google, patents, winer
We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
Al Gore’s Op-Ed piece from the February 27 New York Times:
“It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”
“Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.”
“But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.”
Read the entire article here…
In: blog · Tagged with: climate, opinion
Definitely
In: blog · Tagged with: annoy