I'd prefer to see all Novices and Technicians merged into a new
Technician class and be granted Tech Plus privileges. This would be
compatible with a 3-license system. Nobody would lose privileges, but
all automatic upgrades would be modest.

Problem is, the license class would still be VHF/UHF heavy and HF light.

So what? I thought the idea of the Tech Plus license is to offer a
taste of HF but still leave a strong incentive to upgrade. Perhaps
the Tech Plus HF privileges should be expanded. Upgrades to Tech Plus
and an expansion of the Tech Plus privileges would be a much more
reasonable alternative to upgrades to General.

I'm not against free upgrades - I just think free upgrades should be
modest and reasonable. For example, upgrading Advanced licensees to
Amateur Extra is reasonable considering that most of the new Amateur
Extra exam questions were old Advanced exam questions.

As I said before, I think the ARRL proposal goes too far in upgrading
Technicians and not far enough in ending the Morse Code testing
requirement. Then again, the directors might have made the proposal
as a PR move and don't seriously expect the FCC to adopt much of it.

The main reason for the free upgrade is to eliminate license classes that
newcomers will not be able to get anymore. The BoD thinks that is a very high
priority, even though there don't seem to be any problems with having almost
120,000 hams in closed-off license classes (Novice and Advanced) for the past 4 years.

Why do the ARRL and FCC consider this a high priority? Anyone? Is it
that much work to maintain these closed-off classes?

As I see it, there are trade-offs. In my opinion, having a 3-class
system that includes a Novice license just isn't a good idea since
that means eliminating the Technician license, and that means
upgrading the Technicians to Generals in order to avoid downgrading
anyone's privileges. Either the Technician class should be kept (and
the Novice class eliminated and upgraded to Tech Plus), or there
should be a 4-class system.

Jason Hsu, AG4DG
http://www.jasonhsu.com/ee.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eeham
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/resume...ation_fighters