Jason Hsu wrote:

The ARRL and the new NCVEC petitions call for creating a new Novice
class and upgrading Technicians to General. (I already commented on
the ARRL petition to the FCC.)

I'm not upset with the ARRL about this. The directors did what they
felt they had to do. But I'm still puzzled by parts of the proposal.

The highly controversial proposal of upgrading Technicians to General
is the result of insisting that all license classes be merged into
just 3 without downgrading privileges for any class. It's a game of
License Class Survivor, and all classes but 3 have to be voted off the
island. General and Amateur Extra are (correctly) considered too
important to eliminate, and Advanced licenses get upgraded to Amateur
Extra.

Looks like the added 8 WPM (5+3=13) is equal to the old element 4B (the
written
test an Advanced would take to get Extra back in the olden days). Or to
put it
another way, that having passed a 13 WPM test long ago is equal to 1/2
of the Extra
written test (I'm ignoring medical waivers here). An Advanced took what
is roughly
1/2 of the current Extra written (element 4). Now that the Extra only
needs 5WPM,
I suppose this equivalence is valid....

So only one more license class can remain, and the ARRL and
NCVEC think that the Novice should remain and be reopened, and the
Technician license should be voted off the island. Because of the "no
downgrade" condition, Technician licenses are upgraded to General.

Is the No-Code Technician license THAT hard to get? During the years
when both the Novice and No-Code Technician licenses were available
for new hams, the new hams (including myself) overwhelmingly chose the
No-Code Technician. What's now the Technician exam was two separate
tests back then - Novice and Technician.

Way back when, Tech required Novice code and general written. The old
pre 87
tech plus. I was one. Took element 4 a few years ago and now I'm an
extra.

Back in the early 1970s there was actually a rule saying that you could not
hold a tech AND a novice license at the same time. That Tech's were
restricted above 50MHz, thus no HF operations even as a novice. Even though
you had done novice code. I don't know if that was a bureaucratic
screw-up or
if the FCC had a reason. Back then I wanted to get a tech (phone privs
on VHF
I wanted) so my father and I visited a guy who was the FCC field
engineer for the
NYC area. This guy thought the tech license was an evil anti-ham dead
end that
would cause me never to attain true ham-dom on HF... Anyway, we did the
novice
code test. He set his keyer for a Farnsworth style test, but I had
trained for
slow character code. Bombed it. There's more about this guy, but it's OT.

Both the Novice and
Technician licenses required passing the Novice exam plus one more
exam. For the Novice license, the 5 wpm Morse Code exam was the
additional exam. For the No-Code Technician license, the Technician
exam was the additional exam. By at least a 20:1 or 30:1 margin, the
new hams chose the No-Code Technician exam. The new hams (including
myself) clearly thought that preparing the Technician exam was MUCH
easier than preparing for the 5 wpm exam. But in spite of this, the
ARRL thinks that the current Technician exam (a merger of the old
Novice and Technician exams) is too hard but says that the 5 wpm exam
is quite easy and uses this view as a partial justification as keeping
the 5 wpm exam requirement for the Amateur Extra license.

Most of the ARRL guys are old time HF hams who did the high speed code
thing.
They say code is easy because they found it easy for themselves and got
the higher
class licenses and rose to prominence at the ARRL (not that high speed code
is a necessary skill needed for running an organization, but they used
it as a political
tool to edge out lower level licensee candidates). So nobody who found
code to
be a PITA would be there to say that code is a PITA.....


The record is clear. The No-Code Technician license made the Novice
license obsolete. In the 2000 restructuring, the FCC closed the
Novice class for the same reason GM closed Oldsmobile - not enough
takers to justify the administrative costs and labor required.

Given all this, is it SO necessary to bring back the Novice class at
the expense of the Technician class? Why didn't the ARRL propose a
4-class system so that the popular Technician class could be kept?

My theories on why the ARRL thinks the Novice license is more
important than the Technician license:

2. Nostalgia about their Novice days led them to want to reopen and
reintroduce the Novice class.


The olden days of building and operating a vacuum tube CW transmitter from
parts from junked TV sets. It worked because common consumer electronics
parts could be easily applied to transmitter work. Not so today. Tubes
are fairly forgiving
of short duration mistakes but solid state devices are not



Whatever entry level license is proposed or is established should be
achievable by teenagers who are able to do fairly well in school. You
don't have to be a genius honor roll student to get it, but you should have
more smarts than Beavis and Butthead can muster....