From: John Smith on Jul 21, 11:59 am

I agree. With the congestion on CB and there being only 40 chans for
all the truck drivers, four wheelers, base stations and freebanders,
it is a mess.

More bandwidth has been needed for over a decade.

More than THREE decades, John. CB is 47 years old. The sudden
explosion of imported transceivers on the marketplace took
place in the early 1960s.

Most do want to chat with others in other countries, "skip" will be
the mode of the day on HF--at least I'd imagine that to be the case.

Sorry, you can't really say "skip" in here. That's a four-
letter word used by CBers, as in "shooting skip." :-)

One can still "pioneer the airwaves below 200 meters!" That's
the MYTH. Of course the commercial and government and military
people already did that early, used it, and moved on. :-)
[I was there, on it, helping to use it, 50 years ago...]

However, I have never seen a real case of where what actually happens
is able to be "prophesized" accurately before the actual situation--it
will be interesting to watch.

No? Oh, my, I've met dozens of "nostrahamus" predictors in
my time. The ham sky fell in 1958 when CODELESS, TESTLESS
CB happened on HF!!! The ham sky fell in 1990 when FCC 90-53
created the NO CODE TEST Technician (ugh, ptui, spit) was
to start in 1991. The ham sky fell in 1999 when the latest
"restructuring" was ordered to take place in 2001 with the
maximum rate of 5 WPM for ALL morse code tests!

The ham sky has fallen so many times that it's a wonder the
Earth hasn't turned into an ultra dense ball of neutrons. :-)

WT Docket 05-235 is going to turn out to be more of a TITLE,
RANK, PRIVILEGE bust for the ham "nobility." Oh, they will
still trumpet their high-skill morsemanship as the "best of
the best [morse] operators" and snarl at all others for being
mere "yakkers into a mike." The snarls will still be there,
frozen into rictus grins when they assume room temperature.

The FCC defines U.S. amateur radio operators as (partly)
having a "proven unique ability to enhance international
goodwill." Funny, they don't comment about their unique
ability to be as quarrelsome as possible domestically...

It's a Great Day a Dawning! Huzzah! :-)