On Feb 6, 10:54�am, wrote:
I might argue that this entire thread is to some degree
ignoring
technical advances and economic realities.

I must respectfully disagree!

Speaking strictly of broadcasting, when the industry
got its start
there were no PLL frequency control systems, locked to a
precisely-controlled 10MHz oscillator. �
There wasn't even crystal
control. �If you didn't have a skilled engineer,
temperature changes
and physical movement of the antenna would
have your station running
all over the dial.

That's true for the 1920s, when broadcasting was brand-new and there
was little regulation controlling it.

But by the 1930s the technical and regulatory problems had all pretty
much been solved from the standpoint of which station gets which
frequency, transmitter standards, etc. Crystal control dates from the
mid-1920s and by the mid- 1930s was pretty much required for broadcast
and other fixed-frequency commercial transmitters. It was becoming
common even among Depression-era amateurs.

Today, an amateur can, in a few minutes,
build a crystal-controlled
oscillator that will stay on-channel
with no attention whatsoever.
Virtually all of our neighbors make daily
use of portable UHF
transmitters, in all temperatures and
locations, without any concerns
about off-frequency operation, and
with no attention whatsoever.
(usually they aren't even turned on/off)

That was true more than 60 years ago, too.

Yet the Licensed Operator lived on, because the need for them was well
understood.

�And at the same time, with
media players, cable TV, and the
Internet, radio is simply no longer
the critical lifeline it was in the 1930s.
�The most popular radio
station in town could go off the air
for hours and 90% of the
population wouldn't even notice.

I think that depends on where you are and how you define the "most
popular station". Certainly here in Philly, if KYW (all
news/weather/traffic/sports) or WHYY (public radio) were to go silent
for even a few minutes, there would be a lot of questions.

Of course a big market like the Delaware Valley has many stations on
the air, so there are many choices. I suspect that even in the 1920s
this was true, because AM BC listeners weren't limited to just the
local station. Particularlyafter dark.

In fact, the performance of many of those early sets is quite
remarkable when they're in good shape and connected to a good outdoor
antenna, as was the usual practice back in the 1920s and 1930s.

============
I would suggest the goal of amateur licensing
has also changed over the
years.

Just as with commercial broadcasting,
in the early days the improper
operation of an amateur transmitter could
easily cause massive
interference, even outside the amateur
service. �Much important traffic
(especially international traffic) was
handled by radio and fragile to
interference. �If amateurs were to
exist, it would be critical that
they know how to confine their
transmissions to their own bands.
Commercially-built transmitters were rare,
and even when they did exist
a skilled operator was necessary to keep
them on-channel. �

All true, but that's not the only reason for operator licensing. By the
end of WW2 if not earlier, amateur transmitters that were pretty
foolproof were in common use.

Tough
technical examinations were necessary
to ensure against interference.

But the examinations even in those days weren't really very "tough".
They only covered the basics. Even before the Novice license was
created in 1951, teenagers and younger were licensed amateurs in the
USA. For example, W3OVV (now SK) earned her Class B license in 1948 at
the age of nine years.

Today, it's darned near impossible to
radiate a signal outside amateur
spectrum unless you want to.

I disagree! There are lots of ways to do it.

For one thing, amateurs are still allowed to use older equipment and
build their own. So they need at least some basic understanding of how
their rigs work.

Even the most modern sets can have some odd behaviors, such as
transmitting out-of-band if the supply voltage is too low. (PLL loses
lock). If a ham doesn't know to use heavy-enough wire to connect the
rig to the power supply, all kinds of trouble could result, yet the rig
receives perfectly.

�I would suggest the FCC would probably be
fine with lifting the requirement for licensing examinations
altogether! - really, we're not
likely to cause interference to anyone
except ourselves.

The only reason we still have amateur licensing exams is
because *we* want them.

I think not.

First off, they are still required by international regulations. Note
that the CEPT folks recently changed their rules so that only Advanced
and Extra US hams get full reciprocalprivileges.

Second, and more important, is the connection of licensing, control and
responsibility.

Back in 1958, the FCC expanded the Citizens Radio Service to include 23
channels on 11 meters. They wrote specific rules to govern it,
including the use of radio sets that were pretty much foolproof. No
tuning, no tuneup, just select the channel, set volume and maybe
squelch, push the button and talk. (Yes, some had tunable receivers but
that was a cost-saving thing).

The "license" that was required entailed filling out a form and sending
it in with the required fee. No exams of any kind.

At first 11 meter cb was pretty well behaved, but within a dozen years
it was out of control. By the early 1970s, the rules had almost no
effect on cb users. Superpower, failure to ID, deliberate interference,
operation off of the allocated channels, RFI, use of radio to evade law
enforcement and much more were common.

I was a ham back then, and I remember how common it was for a ham to be
blamed for TVI/RFI caused by cb users with "linears" that weren't.

The problems continue to this day. Just listen to the low end of 10
meters when the band is even moderately open.

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.

============
I would also suggest the licensing exam has not
become *easier* over
the years, only *different*.

I disagree, but the only way to really know would be to get hold of
actual exams from the various times and compare them.

Maybe to put it a bit
differently, we've
gone from deeply testing a few areas of knowledge,
to shallowly testing
a wide variety of knowledge.

That much I agree with!

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).

When we were shut down for WW2, we had
one MF band, four HF bands, and
two VHF bands. �We had three legal emission
modes - CW, AM, and FM.
Repeaters & satellites were unheardof, unless you
were Arthur C. Clarke.

It's a minor point, but the history was a little different. For
accuracy, here's what I found from the literature of those days:

The US amateur bands in 1941 were 160, 80, 40, 20, 10, 5, 2-1/2 and
1-1/4 meters. Frequencies above 30 Mc. were referred to as "UHF" or
"the ultra-highs" back then, and above 300 Mc. wasn't really regulated
at all.

Amateurs back then were mostly using CW or AM, but a handful used SSB
(considered a variant of AM), FM, and MCW. There were amateurs using
duplex on 5 meters, and even a repeater or two. Model control was
permitted as well, and had been used by hams since the 1930s.

While many if not most amateurs had only simple HF receivers and
transmitters, a few had quite sophisticated stations, including things
like VFO (then called "ECO"), remote control, double-conversion
superhet receivers with crystal filters, rotary beam directional
antennas, andmuch more.

Today, we have one MF band, nine HF bands, and four
commonly-used
VHF/UHF bands. �If you count all "digital" modes
as a single mode, I
still count six emission modes in common use on HF.

Sure - but most of them were in use by hams 50 years ago:

CW and AM date from the beginnings of Amateur Radio - 1920s at
thelatest.

SSB was used by a few hams in the 1930s and really took off after 1948

FM (called NBFM) was popular in the late 1940s as well, to the point
that manufactured receivers and transmitters sometimes had optional
NBFM adapters available.

SSTV was developed by hams in the late 1950s.

RTTY was authorized for US hams in the late 1940s and was reasonably
popular considering the cost of the machines and additional equipment/
supplies required back then.

There's a lot of ham gear from 40, 50, even 60 years ago that can be
used on the air today and the ham on the other end of the QSO will not
know you aren't using a "modern" rig unless you mention it. Even some
1930s equipment can be made to work so well that it is
indistinguishable from current equipment.

-----

The other night I had an interesting and fun QSO with a ham in North
Carolina. He was using a Flex 5000 SDR; I was using a homebrew all-
hollow-state transceiver of my own design and construction. The mode
was CW, the band was 80 meters. Neither of us could tell thedifference.

That's a very good thing.


There's a lot more to know about. �If we still expected
amateur
applicants to be able to sketch the diagram of a
transmitter or figure
the proper biasing of a common-cathode amplifier
or explain how to keep
an oscillator from drifting, it would take days to write the
exam and
months to grade it.

I don't see how that would be the case.

But it's a moot point. The FCC is extremely unlikely to change from the
current test methods, if for no other reason than cost.

So the question is, given the test method of multiple choice exams, how
do we tailor the question pools to do the best possible job? We hams
have an element of control, because anyone can submit questions to the
QPC for inclusion in the pools. And there's no upper limit to the pool
size.

Of course a question that requires differential calculus to solve
probably isn't going to be accepted. Nor is one that focuses on
technologies not used much in Amateur Radio. But a lot can be added.

73 de Jim, N2EY

wrote:
On Feb 6, 10:54�am, wrote:
I might argue that this entire thread is to some degree
ignoring
technical advances and economic realities.

I must respectfully disagree!

(disagreement accepted(grin)!)

Today, an amateur can, in a few minutes,
build a crystal-controlled
oscillator that will stay on-channel
with no attention whatsoever.
Virtually all of our neighbors make daily
use of portable UHF
transmitters, in all temperatures and
locations, without any concerns
about off-frequency operation, and
with no attention whatsoever.
(usually they aren't even turned on/off)

That was true more than 60 years ago, too.

Yet the Licensed Operator lived on, because the need for them was well
understood.

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

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

(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...)

�The most popular radio
station in town could go off the air
for hours and 90% of the
population wouldn't even notice.

I think that depends on where you are and how you define the "most
popular station". Certainly here in Philly, if KYW (all
news/weather/traffic/sports) or WHYY (public radio) were to go silent
for even a few minutes, there would be a lot of questions.

I stand somewhat corrected. The last Philadelphia Arbitrons on
http://ww w.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. (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.)

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.

The only reason we still have amateur licensing exams is
because *we* want them.

I think not.

First off, they are still required by international regulations. Note
that the CEPT folks recently changed their rules so that only Advanced
and Extra US hams get full reciprocalprivileges.

Second, and more important, is the connection of licensing, control and
responsibility.

Back in 1958, the FCC expanded the Citizens Radio Service to include 23
channels on 11 meters. They wrote specific rules to govern it,
including the use of radio sets that were pretty much foolproof. No
tuning, no tuneup, just select the channel, set volume and maybe
squelch, push the button and talk. (Yes, some had tunable receivers but
that was a cost-saving thing).

The "license" that was required entailed filling out a form and sending
it in with the required fee. No exams of any kind.

At first 11 meter cb was pretty well behaved, but within a dozen years
it was out of control. By the early 1970s, the rules had almost no
effect on cb users. Superpower, failure to ID, deliberate interference,
operation off of the allocated channels, RFI, use of radio to evade law
enforcement and much more were common.

I was a ham back then, and I remember how common it was for a ham to be
blamed for TVI/RFI caused by cb users with "linears" that weren't.

The problems continue to this day. Just listen to the low end of 10
meters when the band is even moderately open.

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!

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

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.

==========
I would also suggest the licensing exam has not
become *easier* over
the years, only *different*.

I disagree, but the only way to really know would be to get hold of
actual exams from the various times and compare them.

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)

Maybe to put it a bit
differently, we've
gone from deeply testing a few areas of knowledge,
to shallowly testing
a wide variety of knowledge.

That much I agree with!

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.
It's more about providing the proper selection of wrong answers!

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.

So the question is, given the test method of multiple choice exams, how
do we tailor the question pools to do the best possible job? We hams
have an element of control, because anyone can submit questions to the
QPC for inclusion in the pools. And there's no upper limit to the pool
size.

Of course a question that requires differential calculus to solve
probably isn't going to be accepted. Nor is one that focuses on
technologies not used much in Amateur Radio. But a lot can be added.

I can certainly concur with this.

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 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.

--

Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View, TN EM66

On Sat, 6 Feb 2010 13:57:30 EST, wrote:

On Feb 6, 10:54?am, wrote:

[ snip ]

Today, it's darned near impossible to
radiate a signal outside amateur
spectrum unless you want to.

I disagree! There are lots of ways to do it.

Even inadvertently. In 2000, I bought an ICOM IC-746 HF/VHF
transceiver brand-new from one of the major ham radio stores. One of
the options in the menu was to beep when you tuned to the edge of a
band. I noticed that on some bands it did not beep at the edge. For
example, on 75 meters, as I tuned upwards to and beyond the 4.0 MHz
band limit, the radio did not beep until I got to 4.5 MHz. I connected
the rig to a dummy load, and sure enough I could transmit all the way
up to 4.5 MHz (well, actually 4.999 MHz).

[ snip ]

============
I would also suggest the licensing exam has not
become *easier* over
the years, only *different*.

I disagree, but the only way to really know would be to get hold of
actual exams from the various times and compare them.

Maybe to put it a bit
differently, we've
gone from deeply testing a few areas of knowledge,
to shallowly testing
a wide variety of knowledge.

That much I agree with!

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).

I'm a Volunteer Examiner, accredited by ARRL/VEC, so I have some
experience here. The current multiple-choice system is the most
practicable for testing at many sites in the field. My VEC sends to me
test question booklets with the required number (35 or 50) and
distribution of questions taken from the pool. They supply us with
templates to put over the answer sheets to grade the exams. Everything
that we do regarding grading is specified to the nth degree. This is
to protect us as well as to insure the integrety of the testing
process. If we were to switch to essay questions, I, and I suspect
most of my fellow VE's, would not feel competent to grade them. Grading
of essay questions is necessarily subjective, not objective.

I do like the idea of negative points for wrong answers. But, that's
not the program as we operate it. If we did deduct for wrong answers,
we'd probably have to reduce the passing percentage of 74% (26 out of
35) to something lower, say 65%. And any changes in this would have to
be approved by the FCC in Part 97.503.

[ snip ]

So the question is, given the test method of multiple choice exams, how
do we tailor the question pools to do the best possible job? We hams
have an element of control, because anyone can submit questions to the
QPC for inclusion in the pools. And there's no upper limit to the pool
size.

Of course a question that requires differential calculus to solve
probably isn't going to be accepted.

But they could do more in the concepts of things like Fourier analysis
and field theory, without having to work with big complicated
equations. I have a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, so in
college I studied all kinds of complicated equations dealing with
Fourier analysis and field theory (and had to derive some of them on
closed-book tests). But after I graduated, I rarely had to apply those
equations directly, just know the concepts and apply them. The basic
concepts can be understood, at a qualitative level, by simple diagrams
and hand-waving.

Dick, AC7EL

On Feb 6, 10:54 am, wrote:

snippage

To put it a bit differently, I might venture that the ESPN station Mike
cited feels the losses they're taking by airing two programs
simultaneously or losing spots are less than the cost of hiring a
qualified engineer.

(you might, on the other hand, argue that if the station were willing
to invest in ensuring a proper signal, their advertising revenue might
increase by a factor greater than the cost of hiring the engineer.
Their management may have decided operating without an engineer makes
economic sense, but management isn't always right!)

I agree with your assessment. The station was probably bought at a
good price, and certainly the national advertisers don't know about
the outages, or "doubleages". Local advertisement is appreciated, but
probably more of a nuisance than an asset, because once again, they
have to pay a person to take care of canvassing and deal with people.
And employing a person costs money.

I think that the business model is to employ an absolute minimum of
people, to get checks that are automatically distributed from HQ from
the national advertisers, and to extract profits until it isn't
profitable any more - When the tower falls from lack of maintenance,
the station is finished. The people involved are not interested in
Radio, per se, but in what they can extract from it, until they move
on to another thing to generate cash. Its a very short term outlook
these folks have. Get it, use it up, leave it.

snippage

I would also suggest the licensing exam has not become *easier* over
the years, only *different*. Maybe to put it a bit differently, we've
gone from deeply testing a few areas of knowledge, to shallowly testing
a wide variety of knowledge.

I would agree here, Doug.

The closest I have ever been to old time tests is an old 1957 Ameco
test guide for Novice and General. I was a little shocked to find that
some of the questions were verbatim to today. Granted there are only
so many ways to phrase some of them, but verbatim? Looking over the
questions, the Novice was amazingly easy, and the General would have
required me to spend an afternoon studying about tube circuits. No
difficulty there, at least for my current knowledge level. So yeah,
they weren't the questions on the official exam, but I can't help
think the books were put out with a very good idea of what the
questions would be.

So, I believe that the answers have been out there for a lot longer
than F.C.C. question pools, Bash books and all the other examples of
how things are easier today than they were "when I was a kid".

So what is the discrepancy? I think that we sometimes forget that we
are always learning. There was a time when I would have had
difficulties with the tests. Before I learned what I needed to know,
they would have been hard stuff. I suspect that many of the folks who
look at today's tests and scoff, remembering how they had to struggle
when taking their version of the same class might just be showing how
much they've learned in the intervening years.

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

On Feb 6, 1:57 pm, wrote:

snippage

Sure - but most of them were in use by hams 50 years ago:

CW and AM date from the beginnings of Amateur Radio - 1920s at
thelatest.

SSB was used by a few hams in the 1930s and really took off after 1948

FM (called NBFM) was popular in the late 1940s as well, to the point
that manufactured receivers and transmitters sometimes had optional
NBFM adapters available.

SSTV was developed by hams in the late 1950s.

RTTY was authorized for US hams in the late 1940s and was reasonably
popular considering the cost of the machines and additional equipment/
supplies required back then.

The real kick for the modes was the sound card operations. What once
took a good bit of space and effort, is now done with a computer and
some software.

It never fails to amaze me when I think about my station laptop having
so much ability. There seems to be about a bazillion digital modes
now, and SSTV rtty and the other legacy modes.

In fact I'd say the biggest drawback is that to use the soundcard
modes is simple enough that it can impede the appreciation of the
power.

For instance, I used Ham Radio Deluxe and Digital Master 780 on my
laptop.

Let's say I'm doing some PSK on 20 meters. I see a fellow operating
Olivia mode a little up from me on the bandscope. I switch to his
mode, and the software detects his callsign, I tell it I want to do a
QSO with him, and the computer looks up and displays it in the "pre-
log" window. Then it goes out to QRZ.com, and looks up the Op's
information. We type out our QSO, and maybe do a little rag chewing.
After we sign, my computer uploads the QSO info to eQSL.

All that time, I've been monitoring the DX clusters, have a grayline
display and complete control of the rig from my laptop (I do have a
second display because that is a lot of stuff for one screen!

That's easy to spoil a person that way.

Then again, sometimes it's fun to power up an old hollow state
Heathkit.


There's a lot more to know about. If we still expected
amateur applicants to be able to sketch the diagram of a
transmitter or figure
the proper biasing of a common-cathode amplifier
or explain how to keep
an oscillator from drifting, it would take days to write the
exam and months to grade it.

I don't see how that would be the case.

I just don't think there would be that much purpose to tube technology
in a modern day test. That to me seems more of a thing that you learn
as part of a niche you find to your liking.

But it's a moot point. The FCC is extremely unlikely to change from the
current test methods, if for no other reason than cost.

Multiple choice is pretty much accepted practice in most fields also.


So the question is, given the test method of multiple choice exams, how
do we tailor the question pools to do the best possible job? We hams
have an element of control, because anyone can submit questions to the
QPC for inclusion in the pools. And there's no upper limit to the pool
size.

First you define what you want to do. There are many possibilities.

Some want to make things easier, some want to make things more
difficult.

Much of this is coupled to how people see the tests in the first
place. If we want to make them more difficult in order to serve as a
sort of filtering mechanism, we can put in questions that involve a
lot of calculations, then move the decimal points around or make them
very close.

I'd never suggest this, but I took a test once that was incredibly
ambiguous. One question was multiple choice "What temperature does
solder melt at?"

But in the end, I like the idea of an easy starting point, then
becoming more difficult as you move up. I think that in a historical
context, we're doing what we have been doing for a long time now.

Of course a question that requires differential calculus to solve
probably isn't going to be accepted. Nor is one that focuses on
technologies not used much in Amateur Radio. But a lot can be added.

I'm of the opinion that the tests are not far from where they should
be. I wouldn't mind the Extra being more difficult, but that's because
I had a lot of fun studying for mine.

- 73 de Mike N3LI -

On Feb 8, 10:50 am, "Michael J. Coslo" wrote:
On Feb 6, 10:54 am, wrote:

The closest I have ever been to old time tests is an old 1957 Ameco
test guide for Novice and General. I was a little shocked to find that
some of the questions were verbatim to today. Granted there are only
so many ways to phrase some of them, but verbatim?

Why not?

When the VEC system was created, they didn't start the question pools
from scratch. They just took the existing exams and expanded the number
of possible questions.

Some things haven't changed (40 meters in the USA has been 7.0 to 7.3
since 1929) so why rewrite the questions?

Looking over the
questions, the Novice was amazingly easy, and the General would have
required me to spend an afternoon studying about tube circuits. No
difficulty there, at least for my current knowledge level.

The Novice was intended to be amazingly easy.

Remember that in 1957 the Novice conveyed very limited privileges
(small parts of 80, 40 and 15 CW, plus half of 2 meters, voice or CW.
75 watts input, crystal controlonly.)

More important, a 1957 Novice license was only good for a year, could
not be renewed, and was a once-in-a-lifetime grant. Once a person's
Novice expired, they could not get another one, and it was upgrade or
leave ham radio.

The result was that most Novices were quite motivated...

So yeah,
they weren't the questions on the official exam, but I can't help
think the books were put out with a very good idea of what the
questions would be.

Of course. But there's a very big difference in having a study guide
that indicates the general areas that will be on the test, and one that
shows the exact questions and answers that will be used.

Remember too that in 1957 the FCC was still using essays,
draw-a-diagram and show-your-work calculation questions on the exams
for all license classes except Novice.

So, I believe that the answers have been out there for a lot longer
than F.C.C. question pools, Bash books and all the other examples of
how things are easier today than they were "when I was a kid".

Sure. But there's a big difference between knowing the answers are
outthere, and knowing exactly what the questions will be.

So what is the discrepancy? I think that we sometimes forget that we
are always learning. There was a time when I would have had
difficulties with the tests. Before I learned what I needed to know,
they would have been hard stuff. I suspect that many of the folks who
look at today's tests and scoff, remembering how they had to struggle
when taking their version of the same class might just be showing how
much they've learned in the intervening years.

Yup. Or how little they knew back-when.....

I think another factor is the difficulty-of-access part. Some mayscoff
at this, but it was a real issue in the bad old days.

What I mean is that, when FCC did the exams at FCC offices, just
getting to an exam session could be more involved than the actualtest.

For those of us near big cities that had FCC offices, travel was no big
deal, but for a hams further out it could be a serious journey.
Particularly after FCC increased the "Conditional distance" from 75 to
175 miles in 1964 or 65. FCC exams were usually only given on weekday
mornings, too.

If you failed an exam, you had to wait 30 days to retest.

No CSCEs; if a license required both code and written exams, you had to
pass them all at the same test session. The General class ham trying to
upgrade to Extra would have to pass 20 wpm receiving, 20 wpm sending,
the Advanced written and the Extra written all at the same session.

There was also a time when FCC charged fees for the tests. Adjusted for
inflation, the fees could be substantial. $9 in the 1960s equatesto
about $50 today.

For a working people, such limits to access could mean taking a day off
work and significant travel time and expense. For a kid in school, such
as I was, it meant waiting for an exam day in the summer or on a school
holiday that wasn't a federal holiday.

What all this added up to was a real incentive not to fail, because
retesting was such a bother. So many hams would overlearn the material
in order to be absolutely certain of passing on the first go. Very few
would go to an exam session just to see if they could do it; the costs
were too high.

What the old system also did was to make it very difficult for those
who had various forms of "test anxiety" which often had nothing to do
with their knowledge of the material and everything to do with the cost
of getting to the exam session.

To many hams of those days, the exams probably seemed a lot "harder"
than they really were, because of the pressure. I think it's a very
good thing that the VE system has eliminated or reduced those problems.

At the same time, I think it's important to recognize the differences
and how things have changed.

73 de Jim, N2EY

On Feb 8, 8:38 am, Dick Grady AC7EL wrote:

The current multiple-choice system is the most
practicable for testing at many sites in the field. My VEC sends to me
test question booklets with the required number (35 or 50) and
distribution of questions taken from the pool. They supply us with
templates to put over the answer sheets to grade the exams. Everything
that we do regarding grading is specified to the nth degree. This is
to protect us as well as to insure the integrety of the testing
process. If we were to switch to essay questions, I, and I suspect
most of my fellow VE's, would not feel competent to grade them.

I'd feel competent to grade them. But that's not the issue.

Grading
of essay questions is necessarily subjective, not objective.

*That's* the issue.

With multiple choice, there's one right answer for each question and
all the rest are wrong. No knowledge of the subject is needed to grade
such a test.

I do like the idea of negative points for wrong answers. But, that's
not the program as we operate it.

It would take a change of FCC rules, too.

If we did deduct for wrong answers,
we'd probably have to reduce the passing percentage of 74% (26 out of
35) to something lower, say 65%.

Why?

All that negative points do is to remove any possible gain
fromguessing.

The way the multiple-choice questions (5 choices for each) on the SATs
were graded (back in the ancient times when I took them) wasthis:

5 points for each right answer -1 point for each wrong answer 0 points
for each answer left blank.

And any changes in this would have to
be approved by the FCC in Part 97.503.

Which would be the hardest part.

But they could do more in the concepts of things like Fourier analysis
and field theory, without having to work with big complicated
equations.

I'd settle for more in the concepts of Basic Radio.

I have a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, so in
college I studied all kinds of complicated equations dealing with
Fourier analysis and field theory (and had to derive some of them on
closed-book tests). But after I graduated, I rarely had to apply those
equations directly, just know the concepts and apply them.

Me too. Plus real-life tends to be open-book; you check to be sure.

The basic
concepts can be understood, at a qualitative level, by simple diagrams
and hand-waving.

One of the things that ARRL publications do really well is to explain
the concepts without tons of math and physics. Particularly the older
Handbooks and the treasured "Understanding Amateur Radio" book.
Simplified? Yes. Useful? Extremely!

73 de Jim, N2EY

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:01:45 EST, wrote:

On Feb 8, 8:38 am, Dick Grady AC7EL wrote:
If we did deduct for wrong answers,
we'd probably have to reduce the passing percentage of 74% (26 out of
35) to something lower, say 65%.

Why?

All that negative points do is to remove any possible gain
fromguessing.

The way the multiple-choice questions (5 choices for each) on the SATs
were graded (back in the ancient times when I took them) wasthis:

5 points for each right answer -1 point for each wrong answer 0 points
for each answer left blank.

OK, that's different. I was envisioning subtracting the number of
wrong answers from the number of right answers. If a wrong answer
counted a negative 1/5 of a right answer, then the passing threshold
could stay the same.

But then the VE's would have to do a bit more math. Either multiply
the right answers by 5, or deal with fractions.

I have a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, so in
college I studied all kinds of complicated equations dealing with
Fourier analysis and field theory (and had to derive some of them on
closed-book tests).

In my college, the Math and Pysics departments used closed-book exams.
The EE department used open-book exams: the prof would say: "You can
bring with you to the exam anything except another sentient being."

Dick, AC7EL

On Feb 9, 2:50�pm, Dick Grady AC7EL wrote:

�If a wrong answer
counted a negative 1/5 of a right answer, then the passing threshold
could stay the same.

But then the VE's would have to do a bit more math. �Either multi
ply
the right answers by 5, or deal with fractions.

The math is pretty simple.

Since the questions are all 4 choice, it would work like this:

For all exams, you get 4 points for a correct answer, -1 point for a
wrong answer and 0 points for no answer.

Each exam would require a certain minimum number of points to pass. If
my math is right, the 35 question exams would require 104 points to
pass, 50 question exams would require 148 points to pass.

In my college, the Math and Pysics departments used closed-book exams.
The EE department used open-book exams: the prof would say: "You can
bring with you to the exam anything except another sentient being."

In my EE undergrad school, all the lower-level exams were closed book
but as things progressed they became open book or test-free (based on
homeworks and projects).

In EE grad school, tests became even less important and projects/
homeworks more important. One course series involved doing
presentations in front of the class, with questions from both the prof
and the other students.

Formulas were the least of it.

---

I forget if I told the story of Professor W. here, but sometimes the
lessons weren't immediately apparent in those classes...


73 de Jim, N2EY