[Boatanchors] Upgrade question

[Glen Zook]

No!

The CW exam for your commercial test was 5 letter groups.  However, the CW exam for amateur radio was plain text.  It was such for at least post World War II and, I believe, before that.

Now you did have to have "perfect" copy of at least 1 minute out of the 5 that were sent.  That meant 25 letters (numbers and punctuation marks counted as 2 letters) in a row for Novice and Technician Class, 65 letters in a row for General Class (there was no CW examination for Advanced Class), and 100 letters in a row for Amateur Extra Class.  There was no option of taking a written test for passing your CW requirement.  Of course this was before the CW requirement was lowered to 5 words per minute.

On a side note, at least in this area, the VE groups found that in virtually every case if the "perfect" copy for 1 minute was not present that the person failed the written exam.  Therefore, most of them started looking at the "perfect" copy before giving the written exam since it took less time.  If the person failed the "perfect" copy then they were given the option of taking the written exam.  However, almost no one passed the written exam after failing the "perfect" copy.  Now getting "perfect" copy for at least 1 minute was always sufficient for passing the examination so if the person got "perfect" copy they did not have to take the written exam.

Glen, K9STH

Website:  http://k9sth.com


--- On Fri, 9/12/08, Bob Macklin <macklinbob at msn.com> wrote:

From: Bob Macklin <macklinbob at msn.com>

A comment was made about how much more difficult the 1960 era General exam was than today's Extra exam.
 
I would like to add a comment that in the 1960 era the CW exam was also more difficult than the recent CW exam. In 1960 the CW exam consisted of 5 character groups where the characters were random rather than the text most recently used.