"Dick Carroll;" wrote in message ...
Brian Kelly wrote:


I'll cheerfully give up thumping for code tests when the writtens get
much stiffer than they are now.

Hey, I expected that the code test would someday go away
over 20 years ago-

Then you held on to it at least 20 years longer than necessary.

before the volunteer exam system
was started and the writtens moved from being some evidence of learning to
being no more than evidence of passing through a fomality.

Those darned "fomalities." Maybe they just wusn't that "impotent."

As the situation stands now everywhere
I look the service is being dumbed down.

There is no other realistic way to regard it. When the code test is gone, ham radio is tossed
onto the steepest part of the slippery slope. Becoming a ham
will be so little beyond getting on CB that what we'll have is all the Freebanders who aren't
the least concerned about regulations dumping into
the ham bands. Many recent postings here on rrap show this clearly enough.

They got the mule's goat, didn't they?

How many examples of how
that philosophy has backfired badly in other spheres do you have to
see before you get the drift? Welfare? Public education? Where and how
do we draw the line in ham radio?

but it was the only thing I could come up with at this
moment.

Uh-huh. There's a reason for that.

However, I think even those with code ability would agree that at
least some have walked away from ham radio because of the code testing
requirement.

Not "some", uncountable hordes. I've been listening to that excuse for
more decades than I'd like to admit. I never shed a tear for any of
'em. It's a blatent copout and a strong indicator of what ham radio
would have gotten from them.

I'm convinced there are some small number of strong technical types out there who have a
problem with learning morse code that should have had some means of being licensed without
high speed code in years past.

So what was your solution?

With the 5wpm max code speed, that argument evaporated. But it sure didn't make a dent in
the codeless whiners arguement, did it? It's dump code- and dump on code- all the way, no
holding back, gimme, gimme, gimme. No end to it.

Sure there is. When people learn the code because it is of value to them.

But it's the end of ham radio, as the
calendar works it's way forward, at least the end of any resemblence of ham radio as a useful
entity. If we wanted that sort of crap we could have all gone on up to the region above 27 mhz
to find it.

Like you're not already there.