On 04 Sep 2004 02:41:02 GMT, (Len Over 21) wrote:

In article , Leo
writes:

On 03 Sep 2004 05:40:43 GMT, (Len Over 21) wrote:

In article , Leo

writes:

On 02 Sep 2004 04:18:56 GMT, (Len Over 21) wrote:

In article , Leo

writes:

On 01 Sep 2004 20:09:31 GMT, (Len Over 21) wrote:

snip

The Notice is available at:


http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/inter.../sf06456e.html

Thank you for the link!

Any Canadian radio amateurs care to comment on that?



I'm not Canadian, but I think it fails to follw the KISS principle.
They
want to add an Intermediate licence to their Basic and Advanced. Why
don't
they just abolish the 'Plus' categories (i.e. plus Morse)? That would
be
much simpler.

I'm not Canadian either as a "Carbo-American," but I think the "plus"
category is a sop to the existing Canadian mighty morsemen.
Canada must have its share of olde-fahrt hamme morsemen and
those must be "satisfied."

I am - and fully agree with your observation that there are -um-
a fair number of 'old school' amateurs up here, who do not believe in
the abolishment of the Code Test (approximately a third of the
respondents to the RAC survey on this subject). The RAC proposal
attempts to meet the needs of both the "Pro Morse" and "No Morse"
factions of the hobby - in quite an interesting way. Both sides win -
either path leads to a full HF-access Amateur license.

Now dat's a typically Canadian solution, eh?

I'm not familiar with that sort of "typicalness." Been in here
in this ultra-conservative retro-tech newsgroup too much. :-)

Hmmm - not good for a guy like you, living in one of the more free
thinking areas of the country....

Oh, there's plenty of independent thinking going on here, trying
to look at all sides to see which one seems best. That I learned
from design work...and trying to do a good job.

(an aside ... I have relatives in Redondo Beach - spent a few happy
summers there when I was a teenager learning Californian
philosophy.... and a fair bit of anatomy too, on the beach....wow!

Southern California was the birthplace of the space shuttle and
the Bikini...not to mention lots of good airplanes along the way.

The beach cities down here (Redondo, Hermosa, etc., etc.) DO
have some very nice views of the, er, ocean... :-)

What........ocean?

...while driving along the Pacific Coast Highway. Safety first, fun
and games afterwards. :-)

I did see an ocean all the way downf the PCH - damn shame that it
isn't more prominent at the beach! (naaaah, maybe not! 8*p



I would say instead it is a GOOD COMPROMISE and to the
credit of the Radio Amateurs of Canada and Industry Canada.

I believe that the proposal is a good one - inasmuch as it provides
access to HF without the requirement of Morse testing. It does
recommend that Morse testing be made available should the applicant
desire it - I have no problem with that. Status quo - or not. Your
choice.

That's fair and equitable in my viewpoint.

Mighty macho morsemen will disagree and ignite (again) Flame
Wars instead of simple bonfires.

That would be typical......unfortunately.

Realistically, this hobby has more than enough breadth to accomodate
the needs of both the Morse and No Morse proponents.

That should be true but for the outraged ultra-conservatives. Too many
of that group are anal-retentive in trying to keep the status quo.

It recommends raising the pass marks on the exams - good idea, most
believe that they are way too low right now (60% is a pass on both the
Basic and Advanced tests currently). No issue there.

That's good in my view.

Mine too. The more knowledge, the better.

Can't have enough knowledge.

That's for sure!


It is indeed a compromise intended to satisfy both the Morse and No
Morse factions of the hobby - but it does so with considerably more
elegance than the ARRL proposal, in my opinion.

ARRL is not fully into this new millennium. :-)

Some wonder if they ever made it into the last millennium...

In some ways, only the first quarter of it.....

Frankly, they seem too concerned with playing politics than guiding
the hobby into the future.

I see it as internal politics, trying to preserve what they have and
who has it.

The league DOES do some good work. The anti-BPL work is
very good. BPL is a threat to ALL who use HF and should
transcend any politics.

True, and they have done a great job of publicizing the threat to HF
and beyond that BPL poses.

Not to the electronic industry although one editorial in Electronic
Design News made a mention of their website.

There hasn't been a lot of comment on BPL in the industry press.

One reason may be that BPL doesn't offer that much in the way
of possible new products to be designed and made...in comparison
to any of the many wireless schemes which have gotten the PR.

The through-the-AC-line schemes have shown up as NOT having
acceptance in the market...quite possibly for the fact that so few
actually work as advertised. What remains is the venerable X10
system and a couple copycats plus the new Black & Decker line
for remote controlling, all operating at much lower bandwidth.

For much of the rest of it, I see it as the league trying to survive.
They have failed to gain as much as a quarter of all licensed U.S.
amateurs as members over the last decade-plus. ARRL has
filed U.S. federal income tax showing that they are a $12 million
(in 2002) business. "Tax-exempt" status, yes, but a business
nonetheless. Membership dues aren't enough to keep the
buildings warmed, staff paid, electricity for the equipment bought.
Their major monetary source is QST ad sales (to keep QST afloat)
and PUBLISHING. If they lose that publishing arm they can kiss
their much-heralded free services for members goo-bye. Many in
Newington would be looking for new work.

The RAC proposal to IC was based on an Internet survey which was open
to all licensed Canadian amateurs (not just RAC members).

The ARRL proposal seems to have been developed autonomously by the
Directors, with little (if any) input from the Amateur community. No
wonder everyone was surprised when it was filed!

That's the thing...the entrenched "we know what's best for you
(members) and everyone else" attitude. Many don't agree with that
and haven't joined even if they can afford the small annual dues.

The league got away with that for decades before the Internet went
public in 1991. They did all the interfacing with the FCC, most of
the lobbying, then promoted themselves as the Big Brother of all
U.S. hams. They managed to convince a hard core of Believers
who are outraged and ready to fight anyone who says the least
little negative thing about the league. [witness some of its Believers
in here]

I have!

I hope you meant that as "witnessing" not as a Believer...?

I have indeed witnessed such behaviour amongst the true Desciples
themselves - I do not, however, count myself amongst their ranks.

ITo me, it's a hobby, not a religion - one does not need to believe
all of the doctrine, or any of it for that matter, to join in. Just
follow the law, and go for it!


I'm in favour of it - and my comments to that effect have been filed
with IC, as of today.

Good on you!

I have to agree with Hans Brakob in that our northern neighbor in
Norse America is doing the right thing for their future.
Modernization
is long overdue. [excuse me...NORTH America...;-) ]

heh.....that brought back memories of Leif The Lucky from grade
school!

Norsemen were the first European discoverers of North America.

Yup - long before Columbus got lost and thought this was India!

He should have bought that Garwin GPS handheld when he had
the chance... :-)

.....or stopped using his sextant as a telescope

Settled in what is now Canada (New Foundland) for a while.

Dunno why they left...maybe they objected to speaking French?

...they probably left because they couldn't find jobs

(the unemployment rate in Newfie is a whopping 20% or so - WAY above
the national average of just over 7%!)

A definite NOT GOOD situation there. My sympathies with the
workers not working.

Mine too. Been there a few times myself (isn't Telecom grand!) -
nothing worse than no job when you want to work!

Been there, done that, courtesy of the "job security" in aerospace.

Fortunately, there were lots of aerospace companies in southern
California. Haven't been in many "employment insurance" lines,
but once is enough.

Amen.


Industry Canada has much simpler regulations for their radio
amateurs but accomplish the same thing in the hobby.

Well said. The less regulations, the better the hobby!

.....and the less I gotta remember....

Band limits and other technical necessities should be enough.

Fully agreed. Up here, bandplans for the various operating modes are
compiled by the RAC, and adhered to by gentlemen's agreement. It is
absolutely legal to operate SSB on 7.100 MHz, or CW on 7.250 MHz, but
it just isn't done! Peer pressure is the only enforcement tool
required.

There's a slightly different peer pressure active down here. :-)

Has much to do with personality conflicts and self-righteousness,
much less about actual radio technology.

Yeah, I see that alright!

ARRL is 90 years old and they have not had much turnover at Hq.
That leads to "cronyism" in Hq and a resultant status-quo thinking
which has contributed to their lack of getting new membership.
St. Hiram hisself remained president since day one until he got too
old to show up at the office. Dave Sumner is "executive president"
and isn't votable out of office.

While there is a BoD at the ARRL, the publications arm takes its
direction direct from Hq staff. That leads to a concentration of
who-runs-what to the Newington group despite all the self-promotion
of "democratic principle" BoD "discussions." That publishing arm
is a mighty strong venue for getting readers to think the way the
Hq advisers say they should. Not that many publications left for
radio amateurs down here.

and just one here except for the bi-monthly RAC nagazine.......the
other options are QST and CQ.


What many of the league disciples fail to realize is that whatever
gets published out of Newington is the decision of the editors, not
some etheral "will of the ham community." Hq staff have the very
final say-so on anything in print...and print with real ink on real
paper doesn't disappear or get revised easily. That is Real Opinion
Making Power!



Didn't Pravda follow a similar 'open editorial concept' just a few
short years ago?

BTW, that electronic test that can run on any PC looked rather
neat! Simple way to do it and the computer does most of the
paperwork as well as keeping a record of it being done and
when.

It is pretty neat indeed! Free, too!

Rack up some points for the RAC and IC. They deserve applause.

Normally, one should be wary of free things from the Government....


Now, now... :-)

Learning skills of long ago just to get a license in here and now
is nowhere close to being progressive and just doesn't keep up
with the times.

Again, fully agreed. Especially since the rest of the world is
moving towards the future - we would look pretty silly clinging
steadfastly to the past.

In amateur radio technology, the "outsiders," the designers and
manufacturers (mostly off-shore to North America) are the ones
doing it. Names like Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood, Panasonic
(Matsu****a), JRC, etc., etc. etc...in HF, VHF, UHF, and now
beginning to get into the microwave region.

I chanced upon a 5.8 GHz cordless phone at Fry's Electronics
(the huge consumer electronics supermarket chain of about a
dozen in this corner of the U.S.). That's pushing into C band,
something impossible to have on the consumer market with
vacuum tubes. Full digital two-way, low-power radio with all the
extra features of the L band cordless units. Affordable stuff.

There are so many cellular telephone subscribers down here that
our Census Bureau reports that one in three citizens has one.
A little, almost minuature, two way radio working at the bottom
of the microwave region! Newer models complete with little
cameras and keyboards built in. Those extras may be fluff to
many but they've all been crammed into that little tiny package.

Not to mention that many of those units integrate several radically
different cellular protocols seamlessly in that package - mine is AMPS
800 MHz analog, D-AMPS (TDMA) 800 MHz digital, and CDMA 1.9 GHz
digital. All in a package that fits in your palm, and runs for a week
on its dinky Li-ion battery. And free, with a three-year cell company
contract!

Unbelievable technology, compared to just a few years ago. Absolutely
phenomenal compared to 20 years ago.

Agreed. But...

Several of the Believers in here will cuss at cell phones because
they aren't "real" radios one puts on a nice desk in the "shack" in
prominent view. Those same Believers will trashmouth VHF and
above the same way...HTs are called "the shack on the belt." :-)

Digital devices, in particular the family called microcontrollers, made
all of that possible in such small size. I doubt there is any "good"
transceiver for HF designed and made in the last decade that
doesn't have a microcontroller as the basic control and display
handler, the one that makes 10 Hz increment accurate tuning
possible by making the internal DDS control words.

I'm still incredulous at the amazing leaps forward in technology
since I first began working (way back when tubes were king).
Getting equipment to work reliably at high UHF was an
accomplishment worthy of much praise and doing the same in
the microwave region was almost a miracle. Now its become
an accomplished fact.

Way back when of the 50s, only the well-heeled hams could
afford the near-precisely tuneable Collins rigs with their "PTOs"
that could find their way to better than the nearest Kilocycle,
receive or transmit. All others were stuck with approximations
using squint-read dials and "bandspread" tuning set with the
aid of a 100 KHz crystal "calibrator." Now anyone can get a
direct digital readout down to 10 Hz of the correct frequency.
No sweaty-dah.

Absolutely - my car radio has far better frequency stability than most
of the test equipment that I operated back in the 70s.

No one seems to think of the temperature extremes that an auto
or other vehicle goes through. :-)

Especially up here! Some cities, like Winnipeg, have parking
meters with elecreical outletsbuilt in, to plug the engine block
heater into. The outlet is energized only while the meter is active -
money runs out, outlet goes off, and engine begins to rapidly chill
down to ambient temp - which in Winnipeg in February go as low as -50
degrees F or so. The bottom line: pay the meter, or your car ain't
lokely to start when you get back to it!


The Phase Locked Loop made it possible and digital devices makes
the PLL practical. The first PLL was done in France in 1932. It
wasn't until the mid 1960s that they started appearing in radio
communications equipment...starting in low microwave
oscillator units using samplers to get the uWv into the loop.

That same PLL principle made the HP Vector Voltmeter possible
and the big line of self-calibrateable test systems that demand
accurate tuning returns to perform computer-controlled testing and
self-calibration. Frequency counters are digital instruments. Those
have shrunk to ridiculously small sizes in marrying a microcontroller
to an LCD display backlit by LEDs, using a maximum of four ICs.
AADE has a fine line of those little guys, well worth it to revitalize
an old mechanical dial read-out rig.

I have one of the AADE kits - installed on an old Realistic DX-150B.
Works perfectly - a stable and accurate digital readout. Easy to
interface to the set too! Considering that the dial calibration was
pretty crappy on that set, and resisted every effort to tweak the
adjustments to fix that adequately, the freq readout masi it a
(relatively) useful piece of equipment again.

The kids DX with it sometimes, even still,,,,,,,


It used to be that tuning up a tube transmitter actually took
some finesse and a little experience to do. Now the transistor
PAs don't need it and have automatic protection in case the
VSWR gets too high. Need to match to a "funny" antenna?
No sweat, there's several automatic-tuning tuners on the
market, takes the worry out of getting as much as possible
into the antenna and out to the world. Push-button ease.

I still use my old Heathkit SB-400 SSB tube transmitter on the air -
with the antenna tuner, it's a handful to tune up, compared to the
newer rigs. But, if I actually manage to raise someone with it, it's
a minor miracle, and I feel much more a part of the process than if I
simply turned the tuning knob on a more modern unit. Plus, I bought
it DOA and completely overhauled it back to life - as a result, I'm
very familiar with the inner workings of the thing.

My own personal contribution to the past, I suppose.....that, or I'm
too cheap to buy a new rig - or both

There's nostalgia and then there's nostalgia. :-)

Heh!


A long time ago I did those "tune-ups" the old fashioned way for
a couple years. Bloody nuisance when there's three dozen big
transmitters under your care and NONE of the is taken down out
of circuit unless some high rank says so. :-)

I can't see why anyone wants to trashmouth automatic antenna
tuners which would reduce the amount of knob-twisting to a
minimum. Solid-state PAs of today don't need any special
knob-twisting...and they have built-in coupler sensing to tell the
user if the VSWR is getting dangerous to the final.



73, Leo

PS - WTF is a "Carbo-American"? - never heard that one before!

Came from a couple of comic strips running in the L.A. Times as
well as elsewhere. Backlash to the "Adkins Diet" craze. :-)
[or "Atkins Diet" or whatever..."zero carbohydrates"]

Got it - we have been bombarded by the "Adkins" diet craze up here
too. It's nothing that a Big Mac and a couple of beers won't fix

I'm a supporter of Krispy Kreme myself. :-)

Yup, we have them here too - good stuff! Too good, in fact....

heh heh heh...I'm waiting for one of my "fan club" to make more
trashmouth about that... :-)

Won't be long now, I'll bet!



Heh. This reminds me of the story of Micro Henry, who took Millie Amp
for a ride on his Mega Cycle - ah, the good old college days.....

Old story, really, I think it goes back as far as WW2 days.

I believe that - my experience with it only goes back to 1975!


I managed to locate this classic work of electrical prose at the
following site: CAUTION: Not for the faint of heart or
pathologically moralistic reader ......you know who you are

Title: "The Sex Life Of An Electron"

http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStre...do/goodies.htm

"The Physicists Party" isn't too bad either

What will the "children" think of that? :-)

Let's find out! Besides, I warned him not to look! ;p




73, Leo