"CW" wrote in message
news:aaNjb.791973$YN5.789906@sccrnsc01...
Not quite correct. Amateur radio was around before commercial or military
radio. When the government finally got in on it, the amature licensing
rules
and qualifications were put in place to ensure that those on the air new
what they were doing. At the time, most equipment was home made due to the
unavailability of anything commercial and they wanted to ensure that
armatures would know enough not to interfere with others and not kill
themselves in the process. Remember spark gap? Could be very user
unfriendly.
"starman" wrote in message
...

If the goal is to 'weed out' the undesirables, increasing the knowledge
base of the technical test(s) would be a more useful gatekeeper than
learning morse code. Knowing more about the technical aspects of the
hobby might also encourage more construction and experimentation, which
is (was) the primary reason why amateur radio was created.

Actually, both of you are partially correct. Amateur radio has been around
since radio was invented pretty much. What is now the commercial AM
broadcast band was once amateur radio frequencies. The old ship to shore
stuff was largely in the LW bands (spark gap, and later keyed-carrier CW).
The "higher frequencies" were considered worthless. But as amateur
experimentation continued, and it was found that higher frequencies could be
very useful, the government (and international treaties) gradually
reassigned those frequencies to other services. The amateurs were allowed
to keep slivers of MW and SW bands for their continued use, and reasonably
large sections of VHF and UHF bands. Much of the SHF bands (microwave) is
still open to amateur use. I believe that pretty much everything above 1
terrahertz (1000 gigahertz) is amateur frequencies.. until they figure out
how to effectively use them..