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Jason Hsu wrote:
The ARRL and the new NCVEC petitions call for creating a new Novice class and upgrading Technicians to General. (I already commented on the ARRL petition to the FCC.) I'm not upset with the ARRL about this. The directors did what they felt they had to do. But I'm still puzzled by parts of the proposal. The highly controversial proposal of upgrading Technicians to General is the result of insisting that all license classes be merged into just 3 without downgrading privileges for any class. It's a game of License Class Survivor, and all classes but 3 have to be voted off the island. General and Amateur Extra are (correctly) considered too important to eliminate, and Advanced licenses get upgraded to Amateur Extra. Looks like the added 8 WPM (5+3=13) is equal to the old element 4B (the written test an Advanced would take to get Extra back in the olden days). Or to put it another way, that having passed a 13 WPM test long ago is equal to 1/2 of the Extra written test (I'm ignoring medical waivers here). An Advanced took what is roughly 1/2 of the current Extra written (element 4). Now that the Extra only needs 5WPM, I suppose this equivalence is valid.... So only one more license class can remain, and the ARRL and NCVEC think that the Novice should remain and be reopened, and the Technician license should be voted off the island. Because of the "no downgrade" condition, Technician licenses are upgraded to General. Is the No-Code Technician license THAT hard to get? During the years when both the Novice and No-Code Technician licenses were available for new hams, the new hams (including myself) overwhelmingly chose the No-Code Technician. What's now the Technician exam was two separate tests back then - Novice and Technician. Way back when, Tech required Novice code and general written. The old pre 87 tech plus. I was one. Took element 4 a few years ago and now I'm an extra. Back in the early 1970s there was actually a rule saying that you could not hold a tech AND a novice license at the same time. That Tech's were restricted above 50MHz, thus no HF operations even as a novice. Even though you had done novice code. I don't know if that was a bureaucratic screw-up or if the FCC had a reason. Back then I wanted to get a tech (phone privs on VHF I wanted) so my father and I visited a guy who was the FCC field engineer for the NYC area. This guy thought the tech license was an evil anti-ham dead end that would cause me never to attain true ham-dom on HF... Anyway, we did the novice code test. He set his keyer for a Farnsworth style test, but I had trained for slow character code. Bombed it. There's more about this guy, but it's OT. Both the Novice and Technician licenses required passing the Novice exam plus one more exam. For the Novice license, the 5 wpm Morse Code exam was the additional exam. For the No-Code Technician license, the Technician exam was the additional exam. By at least a 20:1 or 30:1 margin, the new hams chose the No-Code Technician exam. The new hams (including myself) clearly thought that preparing the Technician exam was MUCH easier than preparing for the 5 wpm exam. But in spite of this, the ARRL thinks that the current Technician exam (a merger of the old Novice and Technician exams) is too hard but says that the 5 wpm exam is quite easy and uses this view as a partial justification as keeping the 5 wpm exam requirement for the Amateur Extra license. Most of the ARRL guys are old time HF hams who did the high speed code thing. They say code is easy because they found it easy for themselves and got the higher class licenses and rose to prominence at the ARRL (not that high speed code is a necessary skill needed for running an organization, but they used it as a political tool to edge out lower level licensee candidates). So nobody who found code to be a PITA would be there to say that code is a PITA..... The record is clear. The No-Code Technician license made the Novice license obsolete. In the 2000 restructuring, the FCC closed the Novice class for the same reason GM closed Oldsmobile - not enough takers to justify the administrative costs and labor required. Given all this, is it SO necessary to bring back the Novice class at the expense of the Technician class? Why didn't the ARRL propose a 4-class system so that the popular Technician class could be kept? My theories on why the ARRL thinks the Novice license is more important than the Technician license: 2. Nostalgia about their Novice days led them to want to reopen and reintroduce the Novice class. The olden days of building and operating a vacuum tube CW transmitter from parts from junked TV sets. It worked because common consumer electronics parts could be easily applied to transmitter work. Not so today. Tubes are fairly forgiving of short duration mistakes but solid state devices are not Whatever entry level license is proposed or is established should be achievable by teenagers who are able to do fairly well in school. You don't have to be a genius honor roll student to get it, but you should have more smarts than Beavis and Butthead can muster.... |
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