On Feb 7, 2:27 pm, wrote:

I guess I'd argue that there's still a BIG technological split between
wh at was required to keep a transmitter on-channel (and without spurs)
even in the early 1950s vs. what's necessary today.

That depends on the transmitter.

And unlike other services, amateurs are allowed and even encouraged
todesign, build, repair and modify their own rigs. Any US-licensed
amateur witha clean record is trusted by the FCC enough that no formal
certification, type-acceptance, documentation, etc. is required to put
a transmitter on the air. That applies to any rig an amateur might use,
regardless of technology, age, band ormode.

Of course nowadays many if not most hams just buy "modern" manufactured
plug-and-play equipment. Point is, we're not *required* to do so.

I *know* I once
inadvertentl y called CQ on 21.6MHz because of a mistake tuning a
HW-16, that was in the early 1970s.

The mistake was probably not in tuning. What I suspect happened isthat
you had a 40 meter Novice crystal plugged in, and tuned up on 15meters.
The 40 meter Novice band back then was 7.150-7.200 MHz, so a
crystalnear 7.200 would triple to about 21.6.

Such mistakes were common back-when. I suspect they are why so many
Novice rigs had the crystal socket right up-front, rather than havinga
switch and multiple sockets inside. Some hams would color-code their
crystalsto avoid such problems.

No amount of skill in tuning nor technical know-how would prevent such
a mistake unless the person knew to look at the crystal and multiplyby
3.

That mistake would be impossible
with today's amateur gear.

I disagree!

Yes, a rig with no tuneup controls cannot be mistuned, and you
can'tleave the wrong crystal in a rig that doesn't use them. But even
"modern" rigscan bemisused.

For example, many linear amplifiers still require manual tuneup,
andmistakes that cause out-of-band spurs are possible. Not all "modern"
rigs arelocked out of transmitting precisely at the US amateur band
edges, and even thosewhich are can be (and sometimes are) modified to
transmit out-of-band forMARS operation. No rig I know of enforces
subbands-by-mode or subbands-by-licenseclass.

New rigs don't eliminate the possibility of operator error. The
oldclassic mistake of wrong-crystal has been replaced by the modern
classic of forgot-to-turn-off-the-split-button. Etc. Doesn't mean new
hams areany dumber, just that while the details change the basic issues
(operator know- how) remain.

Most of all, a US amateur license permits the use of older rigs -
likethat HW-16. Which brings up a related issue:

More than a few newer hams I have encountered got into Amateur Radio
*specifically* to use older rigs. Often the rigs they want to use are
older than theyare. It's a retro thing, like old cars, vintage
clothing, period furniture, etc. Some of us OTs have our hands full on
the reflectors keeping them out of trouble. Forexample, more than a few
don't realize that the power ratings on older rigs are*DC input*, not
RF output.

The licensed operator was necessary through the 1970s. Today, speaking
strictly from the standpoint of avoiding ruinous interference to
economically-important services, my argument is that that's no longer
the case.

If we were all using certified, no-user-adjustment equipment that all
ahd built-in protection against all sorts of troubles, maybe. But
that's not Amateur Radio today, and hopefully never will be.

While HF may be "old-school" to some, consider that any class of US
amateur except Novice has full priveleges above 30 MHz - includingthe
operation of high power transmitters on frequencies close to
public-safety services. So I think the need continues today.

(there may be other reasons for maintaining the licensing requirement
-- to prevent the amateur service from being hijacked into a different
purpose, to ensure there's a "workbench" for experimentation with new
circuits and /or means of transmission, etc...)

And just to maintain a semblance of order.

I stand somewhat corrected. The last Philadelphia Arbitrons
onhttp://www.radio-info.com/site/markets/grid/philadelphia show WBEB-FM
exceeded a 10% rating. It was however the only Philadelphia station to
do so. KYW was a fairly distant second, (well below 10%) and WHYY got
less than half KYW's numbers.

KYW is a special case. Almost nobody listens to KYW continuously. What
people do is to push the 1060 button for a specific purpose (trafficon
the Schuylkill, weather, school closings, DJIA numbers, etc.) KYW's
format is structured so that you know when to listen ("traffic on the
twos")

That sort of programming is quite different from the kind of radio
people listen to for considerable lengths of time, such as WHYY's
"Fresh Air"

(not that WHYY did badly -- they beat
three high-powered commer cial FMs and Philadelphia's other 50,000-watt
AM station, and if they didn't have to split the public radio audience
with WRTI they'd have been in 5th place.)

WHYY also competes with public radio station WXPN. There's also WLEV to
the north.

But I'd stick to my guns to argue that if KYW went off the air, more
than 90% of Philadelphians wouldn't immediately notice, and probably
wouldn't notice for some time.

Middle of the night, maybe. Drive time - watch out!

I previously wrote:

Why did cb change for the worse the way it did within a few years of
its creation, yet Amateur Radio, which has been around a lot longer and
had much less enforcement, stay so well behaved, avoid such a change?

I'd say that the differences in licensing requirements had a lot to do
with it. So did the concept of the licensed, skilled operator.

That's certainly a good reason for us to still want amateur licensing
exams!

Agreed! But I've encountered folks who would like to see the
requirements for an amateur license reduced far below what they are
today. Somewould even remove the ability of some hams to homebrew and
use older rigs.

For an example, google "Amateur Radio In the 21st Century" and/or look
at the second NCVEC restructuring proposal. (I'll post links ifanybody
is interested).

But I would suggest the vast majority of the problems resulting from CB
were limited to CB spectrum or other spectrum of little economic
value.

Folks whose TV reception was affected might differ with you.

Even much of the RFI was not the CBers' fault (even if they were
operatin g at illegally high power); often the cheap consumer gear
would have reacted the same way to a perfectly legal 28MHz licensed
amateur transmission.

In my experience the cb linears were anything but, and were often the
direct cause. Low pass filter? What's that?

Really I don't think it's *possible* to objectively prove whether the
exa ms are easier or not... have a group of people take both exams &
see how the pass rates compare? -- but most EE graduates today have no
idea how a vac uum tube works (and would find it impossible to pass the
1940 exam) while no EE graduate in 1940 had ever heard of a transistor.
(and would find it i mpossible to pass the 2010 exam)

Couple of points:

1) There's nothing on the exams, old or new, that's even close to
EElevel. All of the stuff required for all three current exams would
amount to maybe one EE level course. An introductory course at that.

2) Tube and transistor theory aren't showstoppers; the number
ofquestions related to them has always been rather small. IMHO there
were more ofthem in the past...

3) While a 1940 EE graduate would not understand what a transistorwas,
and many 2010 EE graduates wouldn't know what a tube is, if youshowed
them the devices and explained their characteristics, they'd be ableto
get right answers on all the amateur exam questions involving them in
very short order. If anything, the 2010 graduates would have more to
learnthan the 1940 ones!

4) It's not really about "easy" vs. 'hard" but about how much
thelicensee winds up actually knowing. I think that it's quite possible
for a newamateur to pass all the license exams yet be hampered by lack
of basicknowledge about Amateur Radio to such an extent that they don't
even get on theair, or are severely limited in what they do.

But the test *methods* have also changed, and that makes a big
difference.

For example, answering an essay question is a completely different
thing from answering multiple-choice because with multiple choice you
*know* the correct answer is there; you just have to determine which
one it is. One cannot guess their way to a correct answer on an essay
or show-your-work problem, but with a multiple-choice question that has
4 choices there's a 25% chance of a right answer even if the person
knows nothing about the subject and chooses randomly. (The
multiple-choice SATs avoid this by assigning negative points for wrong
answers).

though if you have four choices for each question, if you don't know
your stuff you're not going to be able to guess enough right to pass.

True, but you don't need to get them all right. All you need is 75%.
While random guessing won't get someone a license, it can help a person
with big gaping holes in their knowledge pass.

You could argue that essay questions in part test the wrong skill -
your ability to cause someone else to understand the concept, not your
understanding of the concept itself.

But how can a person be able to cause someone else to understand a
concept they don't understand themselves? Particularly when the exact
question isn't known beforehand?

The old exams weren't all essays, either; they included draw-a-diagram
questions, show-your-work calculations, and multiple choice.

Historic trivia: About 1940 the FCC went to all-multiple-choice examsas
a way of conserving resources at exam sites. Sometime during WW2 they
went back to the old system, which continued until about 1960.

Let me make it clear, I'm not trying to argue that we shouldn't have
lice nse exams! I'm suggesting that *the FCC* doesn't really care if
we have exams -- *the amateur community* certainly feels we need them,
and I thin k the amateur community is right.

I don't know what FCC thinks on the subject. I do know that FCC has
repeatedly refused all proposals to give free no-exam upgrades, and all
proposals to eliminate the Extra class.

I think there are two keys to effective exams: - The largest possible
question pool. Make it impossible to simply memor ize the
questions/answers. - Careful selection of the multiple-choice answers.
Provide wrong answer s that are close enough to the right answer that
applicants have to know the concept to find the right onw.

No matter how big you make the pools, *somebody* will probably be able
to memorize them well enough to pass without any understanding. But
that doesn't really matter, because there comes a point where, if the
pools are big enough, it's easier for most people to just learn
theconcepts.

Careful selection of multiple-choice answers is a good idea, but hasto
be done in such a way as to avoid other problems.

For example, consider the classic "how long is a 40 meter
half-wavedipole made of #12 wire and cut for the middle of the band"?

Here's one set of answers:

1) 66 feet2) 132 feet3) 43 feet4) 18 feet

And here's another:

1) 66 feet2) 67 feet3) 68 feet4) 65 feet

Which one really tests understanding of the concepts?

73 de Jim, N2EY