[AMRadio] Petition to FCC for Lifetime licenses

[Donald Chester]

I can't see that it's all that much of a hassle to renew once every 10
years, especially now that it can be done electronically with a few taps on
a keyboard, and there's no longer any licence fee, even with a so-called
vanity callsign. If you are a member, ARRL even sends you a reminder in the
mail with a form to fill in and place in a return envelope, and they claim
they will  submit it to the FCC for you.

The problem I see  with the lifetime ticket is that the dead-wood will just
keep on piling up as more and more once-active hams eventually lose
interest.  Plus, when an inactive ham who took out a ticket decades ago
finally passes, who is going to notify the FCC that his "lifetime" has
expired?  We already have plenty of paper-hams and cyber-hams in the data
base; they may already be the majority of the reported 700,000-plus
licensees.

When the FCC discontinued the 1st Class Phone ticket and replaced it  with
that ugly yellow "General Radiotelephone" thing, and then made it valid for
life, the value of the ticket dropped to almost zero, hardly worth the cheap
paper it's  printed on.  Now, the ham ticket is no longer even printed on
cheap paper; it's merely a  number in the FCC data base unless one requests
a paper copy, and I'd almost bet that in a few years the FCC will
discontinue the hard-copy option to further cut expenses.

Don k4kyv