In news Phil Kane typed, for some strange,
unexplained reason:
: On Wed, 7 May 2008 13:48:04 EDT, "Ivor Jones"
: wrote:
:
: It's the principle of the thing that annoys me, though. Even where
: we are primary users, such as 2m, we can claim *no* protection from
: interference, even if the cause of said interference shouldn't be
: there.
:
: Things must have changed since my initial training in international
: radio regulation in the mid-1960s where the British Post Office (the
: forerunner of the RA) was held up as a model of "we'll lock you up if
: you don't have a licence to operate there" - and the French were
: pointed out as an example of "the ordinary citizen needs a radio as
: much as he needs a machine gun".....hams were a grudging exception,
: and of course when cellphones became available, everyone got one
: because they knew that cellphones were not radios, right? g

Indeed. My friend Colin G3USA (great callsign, eh..!) tells me that in his
early days on air in the 60's an amateur could expect to be regularly
visited by an officer of the Radio Investigation Service who would check
your logbook and that you knew how to use a wavemeter for example.

In my 25 years of being licensed I've never been inspected once.

73 Ivor G6URP