lk wrote:
"Phil Kane" wrote in message
.net...


Don't get me wrong, Cecil - you read my input to the Restructuring
Docket and you know that I was in favor of eliminating the code test.


begin quote

COMMENTS SUBMITTED BY PHILIP M. KANE

MANUAL MORSE CODE TESTING


14. At the present stage in the development of communications, those
early-year requirements no longer are valid and Manual Morse Code is
considered an obsolete method of communication. Amateur operators are no
longer advised of problems "on the air" by governmental and commercial
operators, and indeed the amateur radio service is the only such service
still using Manual Morse Code for communications.

Heavens!! Did I actually read above that someone else also
suggests that Manual Morse Code is consider obsolete?

Mike Coslo wrote in
:

Alun Palmer wrote:
"Dee D. Flint" wrote in
y.com:


"Alun Palmer" wrote in message
...

"Dee D. Flint" wrote in
digy.com:


"Bill Sohl" wrote in message
.. .

"Guessing" wrote in message
news:kTWPa.1427$Bd5.928@fed1read01...

"Alun Palmer" wrote in message
.1.4...

"Guessing" wrote in
news:bXVPa.1425$Bd5.445@fed1read01:

Ask a lawyer about that one. Hey I want to be a BSEE, why do I
have to take History classes ????

You don't have to take history classes in some schools
to get a BSEE.


Broaden the category to Socio-Humanistic electives or whatever
equivalent term that your college uses and you will find that you do
have to take a certain amount of them. And everyone regardless of
major has to take English even though they should already be
proficient at that before they get there. You have to take quite a
few "unnecessary" courses in college to get a degree in any field.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE



I'm against that too. BTW, I got my EE degree in England, and you
don't have to go through any of that wholly irrelevant stuff. No
English, no social studies of any kind, no chemistry (which I
understand is oftem required over here).

It depends on whether you consider colleges and universities as
institutions of higher learning or as job training schools. If the
former then the various non-degreee specific classes are appropriate.
If the latter, then they are not.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE




I beleive in free choice. If someone wants to study a broad programme
they can, but I don't beleive in forcing people to study things they
don't want to, at least not beyond the age of 16, and even then only
to avoid illiteracy and innumeracy.

Ahh, now your starting to qualify yourself and are no longer pure!

Why should someone have to learn ANYTHING they don't want to. If a
person wants to remain illiterate, then so be it. Why should children
be forced to go to school if they don't want to. Why should I have to
take any training whatsoever, just call myself an engineer.


My own interests are not atall narrow, but they are eclectic. They
include poetry, archaeology and languages, for example. If, however, a
poetry class were to be compulsory in an EE curriculum, I feel
strongly that it would be wrong. You can't force people to become
well-rounded. Force feeding is a poor sort of education.


I do not beleive that it is necessary to make people study unwanted
classes to qualify as an institution of higher learning, more that it
disqualifies the college.

You must be related to our friend Vipul! At least you think alike.

- Mike KB3EIA -



Well, he's clearly Indian, and I'm British, so it wouldn't surprise me if
we share some views in common and don't buy into the received wisdom of
the US of A.

"Phil Kane" wrote in
.net:

On 14 Jul 2003 17:31:44 GMT, Alun Palmer wrote:

And learning history in an EE degree somehow helped you to do that???

It taught me to think. It taught me that we live in a culture, not
on a circuit board.

That hardly needs formal education. Besides, didn't you do history in high
school?

It taught me not appear as an ignoramus before
non-technical folk.


Aha, so it's useful in cocktail parties!

At a very intensive (i.e. tough to get into and tough to stay in)
engineering school, not only did we have to take two semesters of
"American and World Civilization" in freshman year, which disguised
a course in Cultural Anthropology which we all hated, and two
semesters of "American and World Literature" in junior year, a
required "Humanities" sequence which we all regarded as a waste of
our valuable nerd time and geek energy (and to add insult to injury
taught by the same professor as the freshman year course), we also
had to take a course in General Economics, which I wished I had paid
more attention to because until this day the subject still remains
mumbo-jumbo to me. At least Atomic Physics (taught by one of the
Manhattan Project physicists) which also seemed like mumbo-jumbo
finally made sense when sometime after I took the course I finally
figured it out with the help of my brother who is also a ham and has
a Masters degree in Physics but hasn't worked in that field for 35
years.


I graduated from Loughborough University, which is also quite hard to get
into and stay in. We did have to do Economics and Atomic Physics, but I
don't put those in the same category as arts subjects.

To further broaden my background, while I was in engineering graduate
school at one university, I was attending another university studying
Jewish history, philosophy, liturgy, Hebrew language, and culture,
subjects I had "kissed off" in my younger years. Was I forced to?
Not by the school involved (it wasn't a degree program), but by the
need to be a well-educated person in my community.

I can almost say the same for my law school (doctorate level)

It used to be an LLB, as I'm sure you know.

education. Some of the courses seemed like a waste of time....but
in practice I find that the background that I got from the
"unnecessary" specialty courses was really necessary for the proper
practice of my legal specialty.

I reckon you must be a patent attorney, Phil. If so, that is a major
understatement. I'm a patent agent, BTW.


Substitute "the humanities" for the string of courses I cited above,
and they are still necesary for one to be a well-rounded and
well-educated person. One can't "figure out" humanities - either one
learns it or one doesn't.

--
73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon



I guess by your definition I'm not a well-rounded or well-educated person.
The USPTO reckoned my EE degree was good enough, though.

73 de Alun, N3KIP

(Reg. No. 47,838)

(Len Over 21) wrote in
:

In article , Alun Palmer
writes:

I'm against that too. BTW, I got my EE degree in England, and you don't
have to go through any of that wholly irrelevant stuff. No English, no
social studies of any kind, no chemistry (which I understand is oftem
required over here).

Alun, California state undergraduate requirements in the 1960s had
two semesters of American History. Considering our history, like
from
the 1776 breakaway, that isn't comparable to what you had to do in
the UK. :-) :-) :-)

I don't know why there is such a fervor of the PCTAs to equate an
academic degree with an amateur radio license class that requires
a demonstrated skill at morsemanship. Maybe the PCTA have a need
to stay with the King Kode rulers of the ARS kingdom? :-)

LHA


I don't beleive either academic degrees or ham licences should require
unnecessary stuff, that's all.

Alun Palmer wrote:
Mike Coslo wrote in
some snippage

Alun Palmer wrote:

I do not beleive that it is necessary to make people study unwanted
classes to qualify as an institution of higher learning, more that it
disqualifies the college.

You must be related to our friend Vipul! At least you think alike.

- Mike KB3EIA -


Well, he's clearly Indian, and I'm British, so it wouldn't surprise me if
we share some views in common and don't buy into the received wisdom of
the US of A.

Come on, Alun. Let's not go all nationalistic on us here.


Can you predict what you will make use of in your career? Right now, I
am making full use of my art classes, my technical classes, my
careerlong professional development, and all the other classes I took,
even though some seemed irrelevant at the time.


- Mike KB3EIA -

Alun Palmer wrote:


I don't beleive either academic degrees or ham licences should require
unnecessary stuff, that's all.

Tell me what shouldn't be taught.

- Mike KB3EIA -

(Brian) wrote in message . com...
(N2EY) wrote in message . com...
(Brian) wrote in message . com...
(N2EY) wrote in message ...
In article ,
(Brian) writes:

(N2EY) wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Brian) writes:

Still no citation from Arnie concerning his claim that NCI is on
record for less technical exams.

Still no answer from you concerning these questions about your alleged /T5
operation:

What callsign was used?
What rigs and antennas were used?
Who did the equipment belong to?
What amateur bands and modes were used?
What countries and continents were worked?
How were the QSLs delivered?

Why is it alleged?

Because you haven't provided any information about or confirmation of your
alleged operation.

Then how do you know about it?

You have claimed here and elsewhere to have operated /T5 about a
decade ago. But you provided no details, even when directly asked. So
any reasonable person has cause to be skeptical.

Lemme think this through.

After you and several minions

I don't have any "minions".

have performed an exhaustive search
concerning my operation in Somalia, and having turned up nothing, you
want me to corroborate my own operation so that you'll be less
skeptical?

Nope.

I and some others have asked some basic, simple, straightforward
questions about your alleged /T5 operations. You have repeatedly
avoided answering any of them.

Ha! That's a good one.

Go ahead and believe what you want to believe. You will anyway
regardless of anything I could say.

Why don't you just answer the questions?

"Carl R. Stevenson" wrote in message ...
"Brian Kelly" wrote in message

Carl check me here but wasn't it you who advocated the abandonment of
all mode setasides in order to be able to run wall-to-wall spread
spectrum on 20M?

No ... I have pointed out that most countries of the world do not have
"by-mode" sub-band allocations in their amateur regulations and it doesn't
seem to cause any real problem.

Not the point and most of us were well aware of the differences in
band/mode edges.

I also (as did Gary Coffman, independently)

'nother sweetheart . . .

postulate a strawman design
(but something feasible, never the less) for a system that, in the 150 kHz
of CW/data sub-band on 20m could support a very large number of
20 wpm Morse-equivalent QSOs with virtually no interference.
That was immediately rejected by Morse fanatics,

What's this frigging "Morse fanatic" nonsense? I'm certainly no "Morse
fanatic", I probably spend as much time on an annualized basis with a
mic in my mouth as I do running CW. I use Morse and I support the use
of and testing for Morse.

This particular non-fanatic immediately spotted the fallacies and
impossibilities in your posts on the topic as they relate to any mode
which occupies an entire ham band and is overlaid/underlaid on narrow
modes particularly under weak signal condx. This is not fanaticism.
This is the same reaction some hugely overwheming majority of the
active hams today would reject on smell or sight. Including the
technically savvy amongst us. More like *particularly* the technically
savvy.

who said something
like:
"We don't want no stinking keyboard mode." (My response was to
make Morse I/O a user interface option. Still rejected.)
"The fun of it is digging the weak ones out of the noise." (My response
was, "You want channel impairments? No problem. I can program
all sorts of simulated channel impairments into the system to make copying
as hard as you want ... without having to trash the underlying, reliable
communications system." Still rejected.)

Exactly and none of it flew then and it never will. The big apparent
dent in your mindset is that where you come from logic rules all. Not
an unusual problem one runs into in linear thinkers like engineers
many of whom are well known for both their technical brillance *and*
their, shall we say, ocialization "issues".

If logic drove everything we chose to do Carl nobody in their right
minds would get married let alone have kids. But we do get married and
we do have kids. Thus it also is with 99.99% of all hams. Hell, when
ya get right down to it getting into ham radio is illogical for
several reasons I can toss out. But we do it anyway, right?

You don't have to worry yourself about writing any simulators,
sophisticated contest simulator programs have been around for years,
all the predicatble parameters can be adjusted to suit the intensity
of the pileups, QSB, QRN, code speeds, whacky callsigns, helluva lotta
fun to play with. They also serve a very valuable role as contest
logger and computer station control traininmg wheels. In the end
they're neat electronic ping-pong games but IT AIN'T FRIGGING RADIO.
Nobody is gonna go play electronic ping-pong so that you and Coffman
can play band edge to band edge.

If you don't get it's your problem. But you actually do get it dontcha
strawman?


Some folks just WANT to do things the hard way and want to insist
that others should be similarly constrained.

What "hard way"?? Morse on the air? You jest.

There are instances where it would have been a lot easier for me to
get from here to there by driving on the sidewalk but I'm "constained"
from doing that. Damned good thing too eh?

transmit data reliably over transcontinental distances ... with power
outputs on the order of 10 mW ... as an "underlay" to existing services that don't even notice that they are there.

Times how many stations?

QRPP PSK31 has done the same tricks. But PSK doesn't clobber the whole
band, doesn't require the development of new equipment, didn't require
a radical R&O to get on the air and can be done for the cost of some
audio cables at most ham stations.

I notice that TAPR has given up trying to get spread spectrum on the
air. Nobody in TAPR cares enough about SS to work thru the bugs.
There's a loud statement about ham SS.

But I have always said that I would not like to see the CW/data sub-bands
(whether by rule or by gentleman's agreement) completely over-run with SSB.


Carl - wk3c

w3rv

In article , Alun Palmer
writes:

I beleive in free choice. If someone wants to study a broad programme they
can, but I don't beleive in forcing people to study things they don't want
to, at least not beyond the age of 16, and even then only to avoid
illiteracy and innumeracy.

Alun:

Perhaps there would be fewer illiterate, innumerate, and indigent people
in this world if they WERE pushed to learn more and gain useful skills.

My own interests are not atall narrow, but they are eclectic. They include
poetry, archaeology and languages, for example. If, however, a poetry
class were to be compulsory in an EE curriculum, I feel strongly that it
would be wrong. You can't force people to become well-rounded. Force
feeding is a poor sort of education.

So, you don't believe that a well-rounded background in the Arts and
Humanities creates people who are better able to think for themselves?
This attitude probably explains why Great Britain is welfare state about
to be crushed under the weight of it's enormous, dependant underclass.

I do not beleive that it is necessary to make people study unwanted
classes to qualify as an institution of higher learning, more that it
disqualifies the college.

Well, if you want to ensure that there is an endless supply of crude,
intellectually impotent people in the world, I can understand why you
may think that way. You should run for a seat as a Labour Party MP.
You seem to have the right qualifications.

73 de Larry, K3LT
Ex: G0LYW

In article , "Kim W5TIT"
writes:

It's a very fair & appropriate question as a rhetorical response to
the NCTAs who have been claiming forever that eliminating the code
tests for HF access will result in a new influx of technically astute
engineers. Bilge. Who will put their expertise to work and come up
with "advances in the state of the art" now that they won't have to
jump thru the "code test hoops". More bilge and you know that as well
as I do.


w3rv

Kim W5TIT

w3rv


Well, if you're going to use what appears to be an honest question to lash
out at whomever it is you are targeting, please forgive the confusion on my
part. I didn't realize you were being rhetorical to the NCTAs.

Kim:

You were confused because, as usual, you were reading for the purpose
of finding something negative to react to, as opposed to objectively
evaluating what was said.

By the way, isn't stating that NCTAs "have been claiming forever that
eliminating the code tests for HF access. . ." rolling us all into one
"neat" little package?

No -- Brian (that's MISTER Kelly to you, little girl!) was merely stating the
facts about what the NCTA have promised what would happen when code
testing was taken "out of the way" of all the eager young geniuses who
are going to save ham radio from our present state of technical insolvency.

I don't think people who'd like to see an end to CW
testing all think alike at all.

Neither do I. I only go after the ones who whine about it.

Have you ever seen me accuse you of being
like Larry or Dick? They are two PCTAs and you are a PCTA also.

You just don't like Dick and myself because we won't pander to your
inane, childish, and illogical parroting of what other people say, or to
your callsign which Mr. Hollingsworth himself said has the potential to
take the ARS "...one step closer to extinction." IOW, you're just fine
with anyone who strokes your horrendous ego.

We all have our own opinions about why we think something is a good idea.

And unlike yours, most of those opinions are being made by people with
genuine operating experience. Sorry about the truth, Kim -- I know it
hurts you, but I'm not going to look at a pile of crap on the floor and call
it a bowl of cherries.

73 de Larry, K3LT