msg wrote:
AJ Lake wrote:

ken scharf wrote:

snip
As far as techs are concerned... Well I knew quite a few techs who were
very much into home brew radios.


As it should be. The Tech license was supposed to be for technical use,
not
just another operators license. But of course that was a laugh. Most
Techs
bought their equipment and set up shop on the nearest local repeater...

Experimenter Techs were the norm IMHO before the debacle of license
class changes in the late '70s, and anything related to repeaters before
then involved significant accomplishment Please don't lump 'new' Techs
with 'original' Techs.

BTW, if anyone knows, I'd appreciate knowing what the grace period after
expiration was in 1975 (I was told by a field-office rep that my expired
Advanced couldn't be renewed and later I was told that I was probably
misinformed and was within a grace period, but I could never confirm that
fact).

Michael

Hi Michael,

Yep -- there wasn't a lot of commercial off-the-shelf equipment available
(that didn't require any modification) until the mid-late 70s. It was
common for a VHFer to modify a Motorola/GE/etc unit to operate on the ham
bands.

IIRC, the grace period used to be 1 year but nowadays, it appears to be 2
years w/o having to retake a test:
http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/ind...enew_amateu r

vy 73 es cul,
Bryan WA7PRC

"Bryan" wrote:

there wasn't a lot of commercial off-the-shelf equipment available
(that didn't require any modification) until the mid-late 70s. It was
common for a VHFer to modify a Motorola/GE/etc unit to operate on the ham
bands.

There was modification of commercial/war surplus gear done by all classes of
hams, for all the ham bands, over much of ham history. The Technician (and
VHFer) had no lock on modification.

But more important for this discussion, the Technician Class License was
defined and supposed to be an 'experimenter' license not a 'modification'
license.

And of course most Techs, however they got their gear working, (modification
or appliance op), used it as a communicator anyway...