[ARC5] Bash Hams from 1980

[Mike Everette]

I never saw any Dick Bash books but heard they were pretty crappy.  I used the hardback Kaufman Q&A manual as a study guide for the First Phone and 2nd Telegraph.  My radiotelegraph test, taken in 1972, had a 1959 date on it.  I don't recall the date on the Radiotelephone exam (taken in 1967).

For the Extra (taken in 1968), I studied the ARRL License Manual from about 1961 -- the only one I had -- and the Handbook, plus a bunch of other books including the newest Editors & Engineers (Bill Orr?) "Radio Handbook."

73

Mike
W4DSE

--- On Fri, 12/21/12, Mike Morrow <kk5f at earthlink.net> wrote:

> From: Mike Morrow <kk5f at earthlink.net>
> Subject: [ARC5] Bash Hams from 1980
> To: "ARC-5 List" <arc5 at mailman.qth.net>
> Date: Friday, December 21, 2012, 1:09 PM
> > 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
> 
> 
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