On Sep 22, 8:24�pm, AJ Lake wrote:
"JB" wrote:
You can't keep all the nuts out but you could make a big dent
in the problem [with a cose test].

This is an old argument. It is the 'weeder' argument.

And it has some validity.

A code test will weed out all the bad apples.

No test will weed out all the bad apples. Particularly not a test that
is given one time only and then is good for life.

Consider all the testing that doctors and lawyers go through to get
their licenses. Yet there are still some doctors and lawyers who are
"bad apples". That doesn't mean the testing should be eliminated since
it doesn't do a perfect job!

It hasn't worked in the 50+ years I've
been a ham. There have always been ham whackos.

Of course. No test or screening method is perfect.

But it is human nature that people will value something more if they
have a personal investment in it.

In the 60's I listened to a daily net called WCARS (West Coast
Amateur
Radio Service- called Westcars) on 40M SSB in CA. They
suffered daily
harassment, carriers, unidentified obscenities ect. 75 meters
SSB was bad then also.

But was it as bad as in, say, the 1990s? As bad as the W6NUT repeater,
say?

The IDed offenders were all code tested hams, likely
the unidentified nuts also.

But you don't know for sure about the unidentified ones. Plus in those
days all US hams were allegedly code tested.

Most of all, note that the bad behavior you cite was all on voice, not
CW/Morse Code. The bad apples may have passed a code test at one time
or another, but they weren't *using* the mode!

A VE team around here got busted selling licenses.

There has always been some cheating on tests.

In the 50's you could get a Tech license by mail. Your buddy ham could give you the code test and any adult could proctor your
exam.

The exam procedure varied over time, and by the mid-1950s the person
giving both code and written tests had to be an FCC licensed amateur
or commercial operator. But it was all on the honor system.

I don't
have to tell you there were some no-code open-book Techs
licensed.

More importantly, there was the Conditional license until the
mid-1970s. The Conditional was a by-mail version of the General, if
you lived far enough away from an FCC exam point. From ~1954 to ~1964
the distance was only 75 miles, and there were a *lot* of Conditionals
licensed.

One "trick" I heard of, but was never able to verify, was that a would-
be ham would give the address of a vacation home, friend or relative
in the "Conditional zone" in order to get a Conditional license. Then,
after some time passed, the ham would "move" to his/her actual
address.

One of the big reasons for all the screaming about "incentive
licensing" was that in order to upgrade, Conditionals would have to
take tests at FCC offices in front of FCC examiners.

And I think Bash came out in the 70's. That's where they were
stealing
the FCC exam questions and answers and publishing them in a
book.
(Questions-answers are SOP now but not then.

Yes, the infamous Bash books appeared in the 1970s.

What Bash did was to ask people leaving the exam sessions to recall
whatever they could about the questions. He may have even sent folks
to exam sessions simply to memorize what they could of the exams. He
allegedly paid $1 per question reported. Over time he collected enough
bits and pieces to reconstruct the entire exam set.

In doing so, Bash revealed the big secret of the FCC exams: There were
only a few different versions of the various tests! That was why there
was a 30-day wait to retest.

Some in the FCC wanted to prosecute Bash, but the FCC leadership
overruled them. Then budget cuts in the early 1980s forced FCC to
create the VE system, and the Q&A became public. Which put Bash out of
business.

Maybe you can think of some test or hoop besides
CW to discourage the people
that act out like morons because they lack self-control.

Sure. A psychology test...

It should be remembered that one of the factors which drove "incentive
licensing" and other testing initiatives was the cb experience. FCC
never imagined that huge numbers of people would simply ignore the
rules, but within a few years of its creation, 11 meter CB was simply
out of FCC's control. Breaking the rules became much more common than
keeping them, and to this day FCC has not gotten the upper hand.

Now, why were hams so well-behaved compared to cbers, even when FCC
spent far less resources to enforce the rules on the ham bands?

73 de Jim, N2EY