[ARC5] Bash Hams from 1980

[Mike Morrow]

> Please don't Bash extras!

Do you mean "Dick Bash Extras"...those who passed their ham exams in the early
1980s by "studying" FCC question "study guides" that Dick Bash published?  The
material was compiled from people who took FCC exams primarily to recover the
set of questions being used.  The "answers" provided in the quides to each
question was typically very poor, incomplete, incompetently researched, or
even non-existent if Bash didn't understand enough of the technical basis for
the question to even make up a likely-sounding answer.  A few years later the
exam question banks were published by the FCC for the new VEC program.  That
ended the era of Bash Books.  Bash ran a gun store in California in the 1990s.

Regardless of the FCC exam era, it is my opinion that only the Morse test
represented any achievement in passing a ham exam.  The same thing applies to
the old commercial Radiotelephone First Class license versus the commercial
Radiotelegraph license of *any* class, before the FCC punted in the mid-1990s
by allowing commercial Morse exam credit from the far far less strenuous ham
Extra Morse exam. 

73,
Mike / KK5F