On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 18:41:08 -0800, Bill Turner
wrote:

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:14:23 -0700, Dick wrote:

There are always exceptions, but the question is, "what has been the
commonly accepted practice over the years?" Out of curiosity, I
picked a couple of QSTs off the shelf.

____________________

When you wanted to find the "commonly accepted practice", why did you
quote QST instead of quoting actual over-the-air conversations?

Is the ARRL smarter than hams? :-)

I was just responding to an earlier comment by Brian that said,

"Wrong again. Hams have always said 73s. I have been hearing it on the
ham bands myself since 1963 when I started as an SWL, and you can read
it in the CQ and QST magazines from the 1940s and 50s so I don't know
when you strange campaigners got into this absurd obsession but you
are sadly mistaken."

So I looked at a couple of old QSTs to try and substantiate what he
was stating as fact. Couldn't find any reference to 73s. Of course
if I spent (wasted) enough time at it I could probably find a 73s
somewhere in those years, but it wouldn't prove that hams "have always
said 73s", which I strongly disagree with. Maybe in jolly old England
where he came from it was the norm, but it sure wasn't here in the
U.S. when I got licensed in 1951.

I'm going to crawl back in my hole now.

73, Dick - W6CCD