On 24 Nov 2004 03:17:41 -0800, (Steve Robeson, K4CAP)
wrote:

If you do, why have you not provided this information to the
appropriate authorities?

We preached to the choir for a lot of years from Guam. Nobody
listened, because nobody cared. There were numerous complaints made to

the ARRL and Washington, D.C. about testing discrepancies, P.O. boxes,
mail drops in California, licenses arriving unexpectedly.

When the hams in Saipan reported to the ARRL VE (a number of times)
that 3 CB'ers with extra class KH0 calls were making sure that all the
other CB'ers got an extra class call too, nothing happened.

If you lived in New Jersey and there were VE tests given at your local
ham club once a month, would you fly to Saipan (or Manila) to take a
test? Smell the rat yet?

But then again, you can't expect the ARRL VE manager to fly to Saipan
because the DXCC desk used up all the airplane ticket money flying to
the Tokyo hamfest to check post cards.

It still comes down to "it's allowed by OUR law"...at least at
present...

Just because the rules are the rules doesn't mean the rules make any
sense. There's a fine line between abusing a law and breaking it
maybe. People are abusing the hell out of the U.S. licensing system
because it's very easy to abuse. It needs to be fixed. But the people
who could fix it don't seem to care that it's broken.

I don't think we should start putting JA's in radio prison for
grabbing U.S. calls, but I think it's way past time where we should
have smartened up and fixed a very poorly implemented licensing
system.

VE testing wasn't a great idea. Allowing VE testing anywhere by
anybody is way past rediculous.

73, Jim KH2D