[CW] Dumb down not justified

[N2EY@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/6/03 5:41:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time, k4kyv@hotmail.com 
writes:


> The push to eliminate cw-only subbands is as much a result of lack of 
> activity as restructuring. 

The only CW-only subbands we have are 50.0-50.1 and 144.0-144.1. All the rest 
of the non-phone/image subbands are shared between digital and CW.

 Take 80m for example.  Even in wintertime when 
> 
> the QRN goes away, there is relatively sparce activity from 3500 to 3580 or 
> so, a few "digital" and a very few cw stations scattered from about 3580 to 
> 3675, some cw activity in the novice band (but nothing like it was 25 years 
> ago), and heavy congestion in the phone band.  A few nights ago  the QRM 
> level dropped so that the band was useable.  About 0500 GMT, I scanned 
> across the band, and counted a grand total of FOUR cw QSO's,  a couple of 
> some kind of digital data signals, and somewhere between 50 and 60 phone 
> signals.  

If that's the case generally, how can we argue the need for so many kHz to be 
non-phone?

The USA is one of the very few countries with any kind of subbands 
> 
> at all.  As I recall, European  countries didn't have subbands when I 
> started in ham radio in 1959, and Canada got rid of its subbands about 8 
> years ago.
> 

None of those countries have anything close to the US amateur population, 
either.


> Incentive licensing turned out to be a dismal failure in terms of its 
> original stated purpose, to increase the technical expertise of the amateur 
> radio community.  If anything, it had the reverse effect.  The recent 
> "restructuring" was the final, fatal blow to the concept.  Compare the 
> technical knowledge and expertise of the typical ham in 1968 with today.  
> Also, compare the difficulty of the licensing exams.  

I have to  disagree with some of this.

Incentive licensing was FCC's idea, starting about 1963. Yes FCC wanted to 
increase the technical smarts of hams, which they saw as inadequate in 1963. 
Personally I think there was a bit of "Sputnik fever" involved...

The changes of 1968-69 did not just fall from the sky: they were the result 
of ~5 years of proposals and counterproposals. The final result looked very 
little like what was proposed in 1963.

The exams were toughest about 1968-72, IMHO. Then they began to be watered 
down both from within FCC, and by external effects like Bash Books. 

When was the last time 
> 
> you worked a station using homebrew equipment?  

All of my ham gear is either homebrew, assembled from kits, converted 
surplus, or restored from basket-case condition. 

Today's dumbing-down process 
> 
> didn't begin until AFTER incentive  licensing.


I disagree.

The FCC missed the real source of "dumbing down", and saw only the effects, 
back in '63.

In the bad old days, (say, early 1950s) hams had to have a certain amount of 
technical smarts because ham gear was very expensive to buy ready-made, and 
required operations such as tuning up and zero beating in order to operate at 
all.

Sure, there were some really good commercial rigs available, but most hams 
started out with less-than-ideal stuff and worked their way up to better stuff, 
learning all the way. High power AM 'phone operation almost required a ham to 
be a homebrewer, because there was almost no manufactured gear for legal-limit 
AM 'phone. What did exist wasn't cheap.

SSB and transceivers changed all that. By the early '60s hams could buy 
100-watt -class SSB transceivers for about the price paid for a decent receiver 10 
years earlier. Zero-bias triodes like the 3-400Z and 572B and similar advances 
in power supply technology made the desktop kilowatt simple to achieve. Kits 
and the decline of cheap surplus wiped out most of the reason to homebrew. 

Check out the price of Heath SB-100/SB-200 kits in the early '60s and compare 
to what the same money (inflation adjusted) would buy 10-12 years previous. 
How many hams of that era could homebrew the equivalent of an SB-100, and do it 
in the same time and for the same money?

And as the standard of living of Americans progressed, more and more hams 
could afford the new equipment, and fewer were required by necessity to use 
ingenuity and frugality just to get on the air. 

As the Japanese manufacturers took over in the '70s, the trend simply 
accelerated. When no-tune all-solid-state rigs took over, the need for knowing how to 
tune up went away.

License test requirements weren't going to change those trends. 
> 
> I passed my Extra in 1963, about 5 years before the advent of incentive 
> licensing,  In those days the Extra was something to hang on the wall (you 
> got a nice certificate type of licence, similar to a commercial licence).  
> It granted no additional operating privileges over the General.  Once all 
> the dust had settled over incentive licensing, I have to say I preferred the 
> 
> way the ham bands were before 1968.
> 

I was a new Novice in 1967. Passed Tech and General in 1968, then waited the 
required two years to go for Extra in 1970. All exams except 13 wpm code 
passed on first try. I got the Extra at age 16, the summer between sophomore and 
junior year of high school. And I wasn't unusual. How hard could those old tests 
have been?


> As far as "restructuring" goes, maybe we should have kept the the original 
> cw licensing requirements and got rid of the subbands instead.  I'm sure 
> Brother Stair and his ilk salivate when they tune through all the vacant 
> frequencies.  If the amount of space reserved for cw were substantially 
> reduced, maybe  the remaining portion would sound more like it did 15-20 
> years ago, when you could put your receiver in the narrow selectivity 
> position and still tune in a signal every few degrees of dial rotation, and 
> call CQ on cw with the expectation of an immediate reply any time the band 
> was open.


During every major contest, the bands are full of CW signals, so there ARE 
plenty of us out there. Why are the bands (relatively) so quiet between 
contests?

One effect we're seeing in ham radio is dilution because of alternative 
activities. Years ago there were no WARC bands, 160 was full of loran, and 
"digital" meant you were one of those rare folks with either had a Model 19 and all 
the accessories or one of those new fangled PC things.

The real "key" in the future will be for us CW folks to USE the mode, and to 
demonstrate and "sell" it at every opportunity. 

73 de Jim, N2EY


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