In article m, "Dee D. Flint"
writes:

"Alun Palmer" wrote in message
.. .
(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.

Since there is no way to predict where your future interests may lie, it's
impossible to say unequivocally what is unnecessary stuff.

On itself, your statement implies that "everything" is known or that one
must study "everything" in order to be prepared. That's rather
impossible for any human to do in one lifetime. :-)

The phrase "adapt, improvise" comes to mind...as sometimes used by
one of the smaller US military branches. Considering just radio and
electronics and its continuing state of the art advance, it is better to be
prepared to adapt and improvise (one's learning process). Continual
rehashing of the old standards is not the wonder that some folks think
it is.

By example, those who have gone the full route of education, career,
etc., have more insight into the whole process and "what was required"
than those who have not finished.

The easy way out is to simply accept what the academics insist one
should study and learn. Noble enough, but consider that academics
(for all their high-brow intellectual whatsits) have their own SYA
agenda and need to to remain employed or to have income. A
continual supply of students is their source of income. shrug

LHA

Alun Palmer wrote in message . ..
(Brian Kelly) wrote in
om:


Brian, I can't even understand that sentence. Can you try again?

I screwed that one to the wall good din I? It was late. The Scotch was
lousy.

Don't duck the bullet Alun, I don't have to try again, you bloody well
know what I mean.

I had to read it a few times. I think the reason for poor performance in
UK engineering has nothing to do with the quality of UK engineers and
everything to do with the culture of UK companies, in which the engineers
are not in charge, but instead the accountants are.

And this is not
because we don't study business subjects (we do), or because we don't do
English or History or 'Western Civilisation' in college (the accountants
don't either).

That's universal in capitalist democracies. But it's better than "the
other" system which proved to be mother of all socioeconomic duds of
the prior millenium.

There is a BSME/MBA I know extremely well who rose to the top of a
local technology-based quarter-billion dollar manufacturing
enterprise. He ran into a nasty show-stopping product design problem
which involved the need for far-end analytical work to resolve. He
groused to me about it. Sayeth me; "I toldja 'way back to get yer
PhD!" To which his response was, "Ah phooey, any time I want a PhD
I'll go out and buy one." Which is exactly what he did. That's our
fate and we done it to ourselves.


As I understand it (and I freely admit there are gaps in my knowledge of
your system), you can get a 4-year degree over here with 120 (?) semester-
hours of credit, and maybe only half of it has to be in your major (?).
When I sat down and tried to calculate it (from old timetables, since
there are no hours on my transcript, only grades) my 3-year UK degree
included about 150 semester-hours of classroom time, of which about 120
semester hours was in engineering subjects, the rest being things like
economics, finance, mathematics, etc.

I'm not a product of a traditional four year U.S. engineering school
either so I'm not much better off than you are when it comes to
comparing U.K apples to U.S. oranges, it's a mess. I trudged thru what
is called a five-year "cooperative education" undergrad mech eng
program. It's quite different from the four year schools' approach,
entrance requirements are similar but just about everything else is
different.

The classroom & lab side of the program consists of twelve 11 week
"terms" at a rate of four terms per year vs. semesters. Ten weeks in
class plus "exam week". The Freshman year is spent taking three terms
straight in class. Beyond the third term students serve two terms in
class then two terms out in industry per year on a rotating basis for
four years. The six-month "industry periods" are served working for
firms which are cooperating with the school by providing paid
engineering apprenticeships supervised by both the school and the
firms. In some instances government agencies are the employers.

By the time they drop your dipolma on you you've spent five years at
it but already have two years experience in whatever your field
happens to be. Once you're in you're in for five straight, no summers
at the beach working as a lifeguard BS. One of my brothers went thru
the ME program with me and we both came out with all our bills paid
without tapping our parents and with money in the bank. I doubt that
this is possible today but it's still better than not earning income
by working in your field as a student.

Credits are granted by the classroom hour and half credits are granted
for lab hours. 212 credits were required to graduate, I assume that's
still the case. Plus grades and averages were strictly by the numbers,
an 83 in a course was better than an 82, no such things as As, Bs and
Cs. 65 was the flunk point. All of which was/is completely
incompatible with the way the traditional schools pass out credits and
grades. Made transferring credits to and from other schools a *major*
pain except in the cases of similar schools like MIT and Cincinatti
Tech.

Course work was all over the map. Two or three mandatory terms (it's
been awhile . . !) of English were the only classroom humanities we
took but there were piles of humanities electives available. Two terms
of modern economics plus one of engineering economics were also
mandatory. There were a couple other nontechnical "mandatories" but
I've lost track.

One cute hook they inserted into the program was the "industry reading
courses". Mandatory humanities reading assignments completed while out
in the work force and were tested immediately upon return to class
terms. Normally involved 4-5 arcane tomes per term. History, lit,
psychology, anthropology, philosophy, etc. For which the student got
zero academic credit. None. Zip. Nada.

Class and "lab" work included mandatory military training (U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers ROTC) for two years and voluntary training for the
remaining three years. Completion of all five years of military
training resulted in a commission as a reserve or regular military
officer.

The technical courses were taught by a number of departments beyond
the mech eng people. Heavy doses of chemistry by the chem dept, even
heavier doses of physics by the physics dept thru Nukes 101, materials
science by the metalurgy dept, math out our ears of course via the
math dept, the early courses in applied mechanics from the civil
engineers, EE 101 & 102 from the EE dept. and on and on. From the
beginning thru around the seventh term all technical courses with some
minor variations were the same. With the exception of the biology
majors . One could hop from EE to ME to chem eng at will. From seventh
or so your department took over your mind and body and the rest is
probably very similar to your path.

The place was no fun at all. Gaining admittance was quite competitive
to begin with and when it was all done almost 70% of the Freshman
class had either flunked out or bagged it by the time graduation
rolled out. Parris Island North for five years, the largest private
engineering college on the planet. 85 MEs and something like 90 EEs
came out of my class of '63.

http://www.drexel.edu/


God help science, engineering and western civilization the day
American universities don't have license to pound at least some
modicum of literacy into the thick skulls of the geeklets.

Perhaps that is more of a comment on your high schools than your colleges?

The whole damned system from top to bottom. Stay away from that button
or you'll trigger a megabyte spleen dump and I'm in the mood for doing
just that.

w3rv

Dave Heil wrote in
:

Alun Palmer wrote:

Mike Coslo wrote in
:

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

- Mike KB3EIA -



Well, he's clearly Indian,

That isn't clear at all.

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.

That wouldn't surprise me either but both of you seem to prefer feeding
at the American trough.

Dave K8MN


In this economy it's less of a trough and more of a small dish

(Brian Kelly) wrote in message . com...
"Carl R. Stevenson" wrote in message ...
"Brian Kelly" wrote in message
The "strawman designs" that Gary and I postulated did NOT contemplate
the use of SS across the whole band as an "underlay." The modulation was
completely different, with a fair amount of coding.

That's not my recollection at all

For a guy that thought I had his backyard to install antennas in, I'm
not surprised.

but for absolute certain any type of
HF SS would require some bandwidth far in excess of the bandwidths
currently permissable under the regs or acceptable by the users of the
so-called legacy modes on HF. The inherent bandwidth characteristic of
SS has made it destructively non-compatible with the modes currently
in use in HF ham bands. Ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes, ham HF SS
is a non-sequiter.

Meanwhile other services use spread spectrum and no one is the wiser.

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.

Why? ... if it looks to the user EXACTLY as "traditional Morse" one would
not be able to tell the difference (and therefore should have no logical,
rational
reason for rejecting it).

Your term IF is the Achilles heel of your whole argument. We've been
down this road, i.e., the problem with logical/rational being the
primanry drivers in ham radio. Ham radio is not a commercial service
where logic is the driver. The standard issue ham is into ham radio
for it's recreational value and the rest flows from there.

Not true. Many NCT's joined up for the public service aspect of the
service.

You just don't get it, do you?

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.

I *was* talking about RADIO ... a system that would communicate over
distances via radio ... just more reliably ... and THEN adding the
impariments
("challenge") at the receiving end to satisfy those who "like to dig the
weak
ones out of the noise/QRM."

Then you better find a like-minded programmer who has extensive
real-world actual experience with weak-signal DXing and contesting CW
and otherwise to write the code. You sure as hell are not qualified to
do that.

So we're back to "It's all about fast CW on HF," aren't we?

You're snapping around the edges of needing AI to pull off any such
code. We all know how easy that is (?!). IBM has a well-funded crew of
their comp sci & math geniuses and a mainfarme dedicated to
periodically trying to beat one human chess player's brain. And chess
is just a two-dimensional board game with rigid rules of play which
allows large chunks of time to make the decisions on each move. HF CW
contesting in particular has more dimensions than I can even start to
count and decsions are routinely made several times a second. Just for
openers. How ya gonna do it Carl? A bit of C++ and VB in a ham shack
PC? Yeah, right. Not even a decent pipe dream.

Kelley, w/o a dream, where you gonna go??? SOS, different day, that's
where! And you're happy with that slop? Obviously.

I used to start digital image processing with Landsat multispectral
images, using a microvax minicomputer, go to lunch or go home, and
hope it finished when I got back to work. Todays desktops are at
least that good.

But you wouldn't know because you're trying to rest on your
rubber-band technology glory days same as most of the beepists of your
era. Pfft.

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?

Quite a few, but to be honest I don't know the exact number (and if I
did, I couldn't say).

Bullet = Ducked

You have no imagination. That's why you chose mech rather than
electro. You can visualize a lever, but cannot visualize an electron.

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.

IMHO, TAPR's SS effort was doomed from the start by being overly
complex.

You're pretty good at that yourself.

And you excel at undercomplex, yesterdays technology.

Beep beep.

Brian wrote:

(N2EY) wrote in message . com...
(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".

Perhaps they were bunions.

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.

After having exhausted all other venues.

You have repeatedly
avoided answering any of them.

Yes, that is correct. But if you do your research you'll find I have
stated much of what you asked in previous posts to rrap. Get to work.

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?

How is it that you didn't believe me then, but you're willing to
believe me now? I just don't get it.

To be honest, I don't think there is any answer that will satisfy you.

Brian

At least not a truthful one.

"Dee D. Flint" wrote in message
y.com...

"Ryan, KC8PMX" wrote in message
...
How about a different parallel?? Drivers licenses! How many here have
earned ALL endorsements/license classes for their drivers license? i.e.
motorcycle operators permit etc.

Those that haven't must just be lazy too eh?

Not a valid comparison the way you put it. If the person isn't interested
in the privileges, it doesn't mean he is lazy for not getting the
endorsement. It's the person who wants the privileges and isn't willing
to
get the endorsement that would be considered lazy.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE


I disagree based on statements made by others here before. Having both HF
and VHF+ access to all of the amateur radio spectrum (i.e. upgrading all the
way to extra) is so important to some, then the parallel is there. Not
exercising the full advantages of the license.

I have had 2 CSCE's now for the morse code test, and let both of them slip
as I see no need exercise the use of those privileges, nor can I at this
point due to operational limitations. But apparently upgrades are even more
important to some here more than god.



--
Ryan, KC8PMX
FF1-FF2-MFR-(pending NREMT-B!)
--. --- -.. ... .- -. --. . .-.. ... .- .-. . ..-. .. .-. . ..-.
... --. .... - . .-. ...

Dick Carroll wrote in message ...

You seem to think you've got some corner on such activity. Hams and other hobbyists
(like ol' CW loving me) have been doing WEFAX for a couple decades, at least. Or were, until the HF
stations went off the air.
Now I just go to a website and bring it up on the screen. Pfft.

ur still a dud.

You can still do APT. Those stations aren't off the air, so get to work.

On 15 Jul 2003 15:07:34 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?

And Middle School. And elementary school. All on different levels.

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

Aha, so it's useful in cocktail parties!

And dealing with relatives, friends, and neighbors as well as
strangers in the many non-technical nexii of our lives.

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

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

It may be that way in Europe and the UK, but there haven't been any
accredited LLB programs in the US for decades. My degree is a JD
(Juris Doctor) - the equivalent of an MD.

Oh yes, I forget - in the UK they adress dentists and surgeons as
"Mister". We do things differently here in the Former Colonies.

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.

You reckon incorrectly. Although I am eligible for same, I have
never had any reason to take the exam for patent attorney.

I've made it quite clear in my postings that my specialty is
communication regulatory law - 29 years with the gov'mint and 8
years in private practice (plus 10 years of private practice in
engineering).

--
73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

On 16 Jul 2003 02:56:19 GMT, Alun Palmer wrote:

I'll believe that when the U.K approach to technical professional
education programs is better that the U.S. approaches when U.K.
technological leadership comes even close to the U.S. on a per capita
or on any other basis.

Brian, I can't even understand that sentence. Can you try again?

It's a test of "spot and ignore the typo". Took me one reading.

You failed.

--
73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

On 16 Jul 2003 03:04:30 GMT, Alun Palmer wrote:

Alun, what a curious statement. What does being Indian and British,
and not American, that allows you to have some views in common?

Well who do you think ruled India during the Raj? I'm not proud of it, but
it does give us a certain common heritage.

Yes - it makes each of you want to be the other. Just like an Oreo
cookie.

--
73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane