"N2EY" wrote in message
...
In article , "Phil
Kane"
writes:

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 12:14:44 -0500, Dan/W4NTI wrote:

No Phil its not meaningless. The next 'attack' by the 'cw deprived'
will be
to abolish CW on the air. Watch and see.

If Morse wasn't prohibited in the maritime community after all the
ocean-going large ships stopped carrying Morse-qualified radio
officers and both the USCG and the public coast stations stopped
offering Morse service, what makes you think that it would be
abolished for the ham community when the requirement for Morse
testing is deleted?

Several things:

1) The number of ships is far less than the number of hams, and they're
much
more spread out.

2) For the most part, the systems that replaced Morse in the maritime
services
don't use the same frequencies as Morse did.

3) The driving force behind the maritime service changes is/was saving $$.
Ham
radio is different.

4) Some of us don't quickly forget statements like:

"no setasides for legacy modes!"

and

"those in the minority should learn to take 'no' for an answer and get on
with
life"

(those are just a small sample)

The "CWDC" (CW Deprived Conspiracy) can try hard - it won't do any
good.

Rather than an outright ban, we may see a form of "crowding out". There
will be
pressure to widen the 'phone/image bands still more.

If proponents of CW make full usage of the bands, then there
won't be a valid argument to widen phone segments. Remember
too that the non-phone segments also support data.

It is interesting to note how many folks really think that the
non-phone/image
parts of the HF bands are "CW-only" and are completely ignorant of the
fact
that data modes are authorized on all of them.

Exactly why I wrote the comment above. There are only two CW only
segments and all hams have access to them now... they are 50.0-50.1
and 144.0 to 144.1.

Cheers,
Bill K2UNK