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Keith ) writes:
I mean I'm not the only person that thinks this about the ARRL, FCC and the morse code lunatics that have kept the ranks of ham radio so small it is ripe for the pickings by the commercial entities. The utilities will destroy HF with BPL and the rest of 50 Mhz and up bands that are worth billions of dollars will be sliced up in short order. When was the last time you heard about amateur radio in your local newspaper or on your local tv stations? When your local ham clubs have an event, be it club meetings, Field Day, hamfest or something else that the public might like to know about, do they bother to get listed in the local events columns, and try to get mention on TV and radio, and even post to your local newsgroups? Or to put it another way, how did you find out about amateur radio? When I was a kid, I learned about it when there was an article in a publication intended for children. When I discovered hobby electronic magazines, amateur radio was still a part of those magazines, though it was right on the cusp of their disappearing. But when I could try for a license, I had to dig around to find a local ham club, going to the ARRL because I didn't know of any local clubs, and had no way of finding them. One of the failures of amateur radio is that it doesn't do a particularly good job of outreach. Notice there is a big difference between trying to sell something to fill seats, and trying to share something because it's important to you and you want others to know about it. Over the 31 years since I've been licensed, my impression is that amateur radio has increasingly disappeared from public view. Yes, there is the argument that ham radio has less and less relevance, but that just means people need to work harder at conveying thei importance of the hobby to themselves. Meanwhile, the licensing requirements have become less and less. About fifty years ago, you might say the halfway point of amateur radio, your FCC introduced the then-novel novice license, to make the entry requirements simpler. A simple test, a 5wpm code test, limited operating priviliges, and only valid for a year. Over the years, that was modified for less restrictive rules, and more priviliges. The US Technician license came out at the same time, and originally was only good for 220MHz and above. That too was modified tremendously over the years. Then the code was dropped for the technician class. Here in Canada, we had a no-code license a quarter century ago. But virtually nobody used it. Then in 1990, we got restructuring, and there was an entry level license that did not require a code test. So over fifty years, half of the time that amateur radio has been around, it has become increasingly simpler for people to join the hobby in North America. Yet, instead of doing a better job of outreach, the focus is always on making the license requirements simpler. Keep it up, and there will be absolutely no entry requirement. You think we need numbers to justify the bands, so you want to lessen entry requirements. But that may be a false path. Maybe we justify the ham bands because it is something more than a place to yak it up. Maybe the kids that use to come to ham radio aren't even hearing about the hobby in the first place. Maybe if they knew, it could be as appealing as it was to me when I was ten. Maybe like me, the code and theory tests are not impediments to joining the hobby, but a sense of accomplishment when they are passed. I was twelve, and went from 0 to 12wpm in four months, and I know I was always disappointed that I took the test (well, I had to go back a second month to pass the code test) in the last week of grade 6, because I was unable to boast to the kids at school. Maybe the need or lack of a code test isn't an issue to many people, because they haven't heard of amateur radio in the first place. Methinks you don't have a clue about the history of amateur radio. It didn't start when some regulatory body decided there should be a place for people to talk to their heart's delite. There were radio hobbyists almost as soon as Marconi spanned the Atlantic in 1901, when there were no rules and there wasn't even any use for radio. Those hobbyists played with this new thing, and in part helped to propel the field along. I'm not sure you could separate amateur from professional in those days. It was only once there started to be uses for radio that any rules were put in place. And amateur radio became a service in those early days by virtue of staking out a claim right from the start. Dilute the entry requirements too much, and what do you have to justify the bands, other than large numbers? But shift it back to where the test is not just an obstacle to overcome, and you may again make the hobby something that society in general benefits from. Michael VE2BVW |
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