From: Alun L. Palmer on Sep 17, 8:07 am

" wrote in
From: Michael Coslo on Sep 16, 9:44 am
an_old_friend wrote:
Dan/W4NTI wrote:
"an_old_friend" wrote in message
Dan/W4NTI wrote:
wrote in message
From: Dan/W4NTI on Sep 13, 1:25 pm


I'll admit that Len can be irritating at times, but this accusation that he
hates radio hams is nonsensical. I've never seen any evidence of that.

Alun, all those character-assassination statements of "hating hams"
are just that, character-assassination attempts.

Morsemanship - as a "requirement" for amateur radio licensing
has evolved to a high fantasy art, typified by the pseudo-
arithmetic of: HamRadio = MorseCode.

Put another way: "ARS" = Archaic Radiotelegraphy Society.

Those radio amateurs who fancy themselves good at radiotelegraphy
are incensed at such comparisons. They wish the ARS to be in
Their Image. [it's as simple as that] Hence the character
assassination attempts when they are challenged.

I also agree with his post that dropping the Morse test is THE big issue,
more important than any restructuring, etc. I have taught ham radio
classes, and IME the biggest factor in whether people succeed in the theory
tests is whether they are genuinely interested in radio. If they just want
to chat and aren't into radio as a medium, there's always CB. OTOH, it's
absolutely possible to be totally radio obsessed and yet not give a fig for
Sam Morse and his silly old bleeping noises. This is why it's a big issue.

Some radio amateurs who are NOT in the radio-electronics industry
keep insisting that "amateur radio was their first stepping-stone
into a radio-electronics working career." That's quite untrue.

All of electronics (radio is a subset within that) is
fascinating in and of itself to those who chose to work within
it. For the vast majority of workers IN the electronics-radio
industry, they did NOT "begin" as licensed radio amateurs. Hams
who are IN the industry try to say contrary but they are just
speaking of themselves, failing to look around at all the others
around them who did not "get ham licenses first."

Some of the incensed have already replied with "case histories"
from their own work, naming callsigns, hollering "see?! see?!"
That's a very restrictive "example" since they've not gone
beyond a very small bound of their own experience. The IEEE
world membership exceeds a quarter million and non-IEEE workers
are in the millions worldwide. Articles in the trade press
(over a dozen free-subscription monthlies) do not mention morse
code as having any significance. If morse code is mentioned at
all it is in a historical context or as a bit of wry humor.

What too many United States radio amateurs are stuck with is a
kind of conditioned thinking (i.e., "brainwashing") by a singular
publishing house cum membership organization that over-emphasizes
morse code and morsemanship as positive attributes for a hobby.
The League has lobbied for, and gotten, high-rate morsemanship
as a prerequisite for "advanced" (status/rank/privilege) class
licensing...and just never gave up on that until after WRC-03.
The League's core membership and BoD are still of that
generation and are stuck in their ways. They can't change.

As Cecil Moore used to write in here, "If all you've got is a
hammer, everything looks like a nail." :-)

If CW had been on the ITU agenda back in '93, which it was supposed to be,
s25 would have been amended back then, and we could have seen an explosion
in our numbers before the Internet really caught on. As it is, ham radio is
as old as yesterday's newspaper. In short, it's probably too late to get a
major boost in numbers, even if we gave the licences away, which abolishing
the code test certainly doesn't do (and no, I'm not proposing we make the
theory easier).

Astute observation. I agree with most of that.

I will disagree only with the "what if" of 1993 and any
possibility of S25 being changed in any radical way. The IARU
had not yet been turned around on their collective code test
opinion, their member organizations still fixated on standards
and practices of their leaders' youth and formative years.
However, the no-code-test movement had already been started a
decade before that, albeit small, ineffectual in the beginning
but growing in intensity as time went on.

Judging by all the past reports of WARCs and WRCs, the IARU was
more influential with the ITU than what the ARRL pretended to be.
The IARU was also embroiled in a number of problems such as the
40m amateur v. SWBC allocations that was SUPPOSED to have been
addressed at WARC-79. It was put off...and put off...until
finally, after 24 years it achieved a solution at WRC-03...which
won't be fully implemented until a few years from now.

In the United States the ARRL still hasn't fully understood that
the 1991 opening up of the no-code-test Technician class license
added over 200 thousand NEW radio amateurs to the amateur
database. If that had not happened, the United States hams would
have SHRUNK in overall numbers in today's database...even though
the overall population is continuing to increase. As it is, the
number of amateur licensees here have been virtually stagnant for
over two years, NOT growing and decreasing a miniscule amount
since the 2003 peak period. The trend is THERE. The licensees
keeping the numbers up are the newcomers arriving via the no-
code-test Tech class. Unrenewed license attrition is greater.

The enormous worldwide growth of the Internet and availability of
personal computers has stolen MUCH of the "magic" out of the
"shortwave radio" mystique. That can't be regained by insisting
on the alleged "necessity" to learn and test for radio-
telegraphy...for a hobby. Morse code won't defeat terrorists or
save lives or be the First Responder on the scene of disasters.

Radio - by itself - still has tremendous fascination to many. It
may be that elimination of the code test will produce some
increase. Certainly, judging from Comments of WT Docket 05-235,
there will be a surge of "upgraders" to "higher" classes. That
does little to the overall license totals. The PC and Internet
is the Great Challenge to amateur radio for 24/7 personal
communications...almost gargantuan competition, already dwarfing
other competitors. The number of Comments on Docket 05-235,
after only two months, are GREATER than the total number of
Comments on "restructuring" (WT Docket 98-143) for all of 1998!
Most filings on 05-235 are done electronically. Over on
www.qrz.com, the electronic comments on code testing are greater
than four times the filings on 05-235 (I stopped reading them a
couple weeks ago...too many). We are IN the electronic digital
age NOW.

I'll go out on a limb and say that, should code testing be
abolished for amateur radio, the license totals might jump to
20% more than current numbers and then level off. Assumption
only, more of a guess than anything. The sky will fall on
the old amateur morsemen, the "world as they know it" will be
a total disaster zone with bitter, angry recriminations
abounding. They will ignore all the years, the decades of
themselves parading proudly as Champions of Radio and
sneering, snarling at no-coders.