"Dick Carroll;" wrote:

Well, Dwight, you just showed the exctent of your
knoweldge of the subject. NONE! Obviously you
have no HF receiving capability and likely just as
much interest, and just choose to adopt the standard
NCI mantra. An even cursury tuning across the lower
end of any low HF band any evening will show to be
180 degrees out of phase with reality.


To clarify, the dispute is about how much of a role code/CW plays within
the Amateur Radio Service today and whether the FCC has an incentive to
maintain testing for this mode. To decide that, we first have to look at the
number of people using code and what it is used for. As for the numbers,
even excluding the "no-code" Techs, I think most would agree that the
majority mainly use the voice modes and only rarely use code. Add in the
"no-code" Techs and it is fairly clear that most Ham operators don't use
code.

The next question is what code is used for. Clearly, code only plays a
very small role in emergency communications today (a key component of
Amateur Radio). Likewise, code is seldom used by the agencies we serve (Red
Cross, Civil Service, and so on). In each of these (agencies served and
emergency communications), voice is the dominate mode. That leaves only
recreation as the primary use of CW/code.

With these facts, we can now go back to my primary point - does the FCC
have any incentive to maintain testing for a mode that is mainly used for
recreation and not used by the majority of todays' ham operators? I think
the answer to that is fairly obvious.


Dwight Stewart (W5NET)

http://www.qsl.net/w5net/