In article ,
"dBc" wrote:

Greetings Telamon..

Regarding:
"It was meant as a divisive description of amateurs. Most
amateurs I have come across are not much more than equipment
operators. Some appear to be good operators but do not seem to
exhibit any depth beyond that."

I believe this may be called appliance operator syndrome. With a
move away from concentrating on understand fundamental
electronics and circuits at the component level and their
operation, and not testing for such on the current amateur exams,
this results in the above syndrome. Result, is it any wonder that
a tsunami of technical design work is now being done overseas, OR
is moving overseas, where the science is considered/taught more
intensely at a younger age and school level.

This is exactly my thoughts on the subject. Amateur radio started out
with very little equipment made for it and the amateur had to build it
himself. The amateur service will only improve if the government
requires more technical understanding of the hobby since you can just go
out and buy everything you need to get on the air.

"If you like to fix your own electronics it makes sense but if
you do not it doesn't make any difference. I would suspect for
most people it makes no difference."

I would like to at least believe that the regular newsgroup crowd
here are of a more technical nature. Perhaps, they are
[primarily] nothing more than appliance operators - but I would
like to believe otherwise.

I'm sure they are no more technical that the people in the ham news
groups. At least that is the way it looked to me when I used to read
groups such as rec.radio.amateur.antenna. If you ever fell the need to
go insane go read that news group. I guarantee you will be muttering at
the monitor. You can read threads hundreds of posts long about electrons
sloshing back and forth in a coax due to some amount of VSWR on one end.

As mentioned in another thread here, the gentleman in South Africa
has recently purchased a IC-7700 that sits along side his IC-756 PRO
III. Apparently, he primarily listens (ONLY) to LF and MW. No
transmitting - amazing!

Yeah, he wants to use the digitally sharp and narrow filters to listen
to AM broadcasts in SSB mode so he can DX the AMBCB band. I'll stick
with SW receivers.

One thing is for certain, there is little doubt, that some of the
folks here have more of a budget than I do with my modest set up.

Most of the people I read in this news group appear to have portables
that cost $100 to $500. Others own boatanchors and a few have spent many
thousands of dollars on high end receivers and there are a few
individuals that hang around for no apparent reason generating
continuous streams of garbage posts.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California