On Feb 6, 10:54 am, wrote:

snippage

To put it a bit differently, I might venture that the ESPN station Mike
cited feels the losses they're taking by airing two programs
simultaneously or losing spots are less than the cost of hiring a
qualified engineer.

(you might, on the other hand, argue that if the station were willing
to invest in ensuring a proper signal, their advertising revenue might
increase by a factor greater than the cost of hiring the engineer.
Their management may have decided operating without an engineer makes
economic sense, but management isn't always right!)

I agree with your assessment. The station was probably bought at a
good price, and certainly the national advertisers don't know about
the outages, or "doubleages". Local advertisement is appreciated, but
probably more of a nuisance than an asset, because once again, they
have to pay a person to take care of canvassing and deal with people.
And employing a person costs money.

I think that the business model is to employ an absolute minimum of
people, to get checks that are automatically distributed from HQ from
the national advertisers, and to extract profits until it isn't
profitable any more - When the tower falls from lack of maintenance,
the station is finished. The people involved are not interested in
Radio, per se, but in what they can extract from it, until they move
on to another thing to generate cash. Its a very short term outlook
these folks have. Get it, use it up, leave it.

snippage

I would also suggest the licensing exam has not become *easier* over
the years, only *different*. Maybe to put it a bit differently, we've
gone from deeply testing a few areas of knowledge, to shallowly testing
a wide variety of knowledge.

I would agree here, Doug.

The closest I have ever been to old time tests is an old 1957 Ameco
test guide for Novice and General. I was a little shocked to find that
some of the questions were verbatim to today. Granted there are only
so many ways to phrase some of them, but verbatim? Looking over the
questions, the Novice was amazingly easy, and the General would have
required me to spend an afternoon studying about tube circuits. No
difficulty there, at least for my current knowledge level. So yeah,
they weren't the questions on the official exam, but I can't help
think the books were put out with a very good idea of what the
questions would be.

So, I believe that the answers have been out there for a lot longer
than F.C.C. question pools, Bash books and all the other examples of
how things are easier today than they were "when I was a kid".

So what is the discrepancy? I think that we sometimes forget that we
are always learning. There was a time when I would have had
difficulties with the tests. Before I learned what I needed to know,
they would have been hard stuff. I suspect that many of the folks who
look at today's tests and scoff, remembering how they had to struggle
when taking their version of the same class might just be showing how
much they've learned in the intervening years.