[AMRadio] Petition to FCC for Lifetime licenses

[Rob Atkinson]

Further, there is no equivalence between the GROL which is an operator
license (sort of) and a ham license which is partly a station license
in the sense that it is tied to a location.

If anything I think we should still have to renew every 5 years.  That
kept hams filing address updates.  Yes, the law says they have to
anyway, but how many comply if they don't have to renew as often?

There was a time when you signed an agreement, to renew your _grant_
(a license is a GRANT, at least at one time the reverse of the license
said "Conditions of Grant").  The agreement stipulated a certain level
of activity, and adherence to law.  I don't think that should be a
one-time deal.

If a person loses interest and can't be bothered with renewal and a
new commitment, then his ticket should lapse.  It is not the same
thing as getting a social security number.

Rob
K5UJ


On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 4:44 PM, Donald Chester <k4kyv at charter.net> wrote:
> 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.
>