Dee Flint wrote:
"KØHB" wrote in message
ink.net...

wrote

After the incentive licnesing rules went into effect
in the 1967-1969 period, the number of US hams began to
grow much faster than it had during the 1960s. The growth of
the 1970s continued into the 1980s.

Are you suggesting that making it tougher to get full privileges was the
cause that accelerated the growth of the ARS? That has to qualify as the
most outrageous notion to hit RRAP (outside the dump huck posts from Mark)
in the current century.

Clearly other "market forces" were in play for the ARS to enjoy the
popularity it did in the post-Sputnik years. Science was "cool" and the
hot ticket for education and career planning. Scientifiic-seeming hobbies
like electronics, radio, and astronomy were beneficiaries of this
attitude. If anything, dis-incentive licensing was a damper (not an
accelerant) on the growth of the ARS during that period.

If incentive licensing was so awful, why was there so much
growth in the ARS in the two decades after it was put in
place?

Can you imagine how much more growth we'd have had without its repressive
effects on our hobby!

We will never know for sure whether it had a beneficial or adverse effecton
the hobby. Although it may have made it harder to get full privileges, it
seems to have made it easier to get beginner and intermediate privileges.

Well, sort of, Dee.

The requirements for Novice didn't change at all. The requirements for
Tech
did not change until 1987, when the single written that had been used
for both Tech and General was split into two elements.

The prospective ham could take the journey in smaller steps and have
meaningful privileges along the way. Although the implementation was poorly
handled (i.e. some people actually losing privileges), the concept of having
a series of smaller, easier to manage steps makes sense if you want to get
people involved in the hobby. They don't have to go all out to sample the
hobby. They can get basic privileges and see if they like it before they
dive into it fully.

That was the genius of the Novice license.

What really torqued off a lot of hams was that for all the time they'd
been hams,
the General/Conditional had been the top license for all intents and
purposes. Sure, the
Advanced still existed, but it was closed to new issues and conveyed no
additional operating privileges. The Extra was there too, and a few
thousand
hams got one, but again there wasn't much reason to get one.

What IL did was move the finish line a lot further away.

So for most post-1952 hams, the license process consisted of learning
enough to get a Novice, using the Novice year to learn enough to get a
General or Conditional, and then enjoying full amateur privileges. IL
added two more license steps to full privileges, and the tests for
those two steps were not usually available by mail.

Some might say that there were actually three or four steps added - two
written tests and one or two code tests (depending on whether you
consider the sending and receiving code tests as one or two).

Personally I think that the previous 5 license approach was too many and
that 3 steps is about right. However as far as the written test material
goes, I think the jump in difficulty from Tech to General is too small and
the jump from General to Extra is too large.

If it were up to me there would be four steps, and all four would
contain a mix
of HF, VHF and UHF privileges. But FCC's vision is different, and they
said so in
the NPRM.

From what I've read from FCC, the step from Tech to General is
intentionally kept
rather small to encourage Techs to upgrade to General rather than to
Tech Plus
or "Tech-with-HF".

73 de Jim, N2EY