KØHB wrote:

"Bill Sohl" wrote

| Neither ARRL nor NCVEC proposes any lowering of written
| qualifications for General or Extra from what I have seen.


ARRL has proposed that current Techs/Tech+ be upgraded to General.
Since the current General qualification protocol calls for both the
current Technician written test and an additional more strenuous General
written examination, granting a Technician license to someone who has
not passed that additional examination ipso facto results in a lowering
of written qualifications for the one-third of a million licensees
affected.

Correct. And then there is the "day after" problem. Anyone that thinks
that there won't be tremndous pressure exerted to KEEP the testing at
the Tech level is less than clever.

By contrast, your plan is wonderful, and you know I have some problems
with your plan. But if it were a choice between the three, You'd have
it. At least yours won't reduce qualifications overall.


Now you can dance around that fact all you want, but you can't change
the reality that the "written qualifications for General" will have been
lowered for roughly 323,055 individuals. We can
pick-fly****-out-of-the-pepper-pot forever wrestling with the niceties
of semantics, but the cold hard fact is that out of the new 'combined'
General class, only 30% would have met todays written qualifications for
that license. The remaining 70% would have met a significantly lower
qualification. That walks like "lowered qualifications", it talks like
"lowered qualifications", it smells like "lowered qualifications", and
in fact IS "lowered qualifications".


| It is not about caring what you may think, but rather what
| our (NCI) membership wants.

Are you sure? Here is a direct quote from an email from another of the
NCI directors.

".....our members by an overwhelming percentage
like most parts of the ARRL proposal. That
doesn't translate into what our comments will
end up being; it's like sausage made by a Board
of people. We'll see what happens ...."

I can easily interpret that to mean that the "sausage" may NOT
necessarily include all the ingredients desired by "an overwhelming
percentage" of NCI members.


From what I've seen, a "semi official" position of NCI is "we don't
care what anyone thinks".

- Mike KB3EIA -