[CW] American Morse Illegal on the Ham Bands?
Donald Chester
k4kyv at charter.net
Mon May 20 12:53:25 EDT 2013
At Dayton this past weekend, I visited the Morse Telegraph Club stall, and
an interesting subject came up, a rumour that the FCC had outlawed the use
of the American landline Morse Code on the amateur bands. Jim Wades,
WB8SIW, told me this was started by a retired FCC official who writes a
monthly column in a ham publication. The first name to come to mind was
Riley Hollingsworth, whose column appears in CQ magazine. Jim said no, it
was not Riley, but couldn't think of the person's name. It immediately
dawned on me that it was probably Johnny Johnston, who wrote a monthly
column in the now defunct World Radio magazine. That jogged Jim's memory,
and he said yes indeed, that's who it was.
This sounded just like Johnston, who is apparently still trying to pull
punches and screw over certain classes of amateur operators he doesn't like,
even years after retiring from the FCC. John B. Johnston, now W3BE, was
chief of the amateur rulemaking division of the FCC for over 25 years,
starting in 1973, until he retired in 1998. During his quarter-century
watch, we saw a lot of damage inflicted on the amateur service via radical
changes in the FCC rules, even though some of the more outrageous docket
proposals were dismissed.
My first introduction to Johnston was at the Dayton FCC forum circa 1974,
when he introduced the amateur community to Docket 20777, the infamous
"bandwidth" proposal that would have redefined sub-bands and permissible
emission modes in terms of signal bandwidth rather than emission type. The
official title of this proposal touted the word "Deregulation", but the
proposal was worded in such a way to preclude double sideband AM on all
phone bands below 28 MHz, as well as fast-scan TV in the 440 MHz band.
After the forum, a group of AM and FSTV enthusiasts tried to further discuss
the proposal with Johnston, but he quickly turned away and said he didn't
have time to talk about it because he had to leave to go to another forum at
a CB get-together.
It was Johnston who ushered in the 1983 revision to the amateur power limit,
defining legal power in terms of p.e.p. output. One of the side effects of
this change appears to theoretically reduce the legal power limit for AM
phone to about one-half the previous limit, while doubling the limit for
certain other modes, including CW. Several individuals as well as the ARRL
submitted Petitions for Reconsideration, that would each have in some way
grandfathered in the old AM power limit.
At the subsequent Dayton FCC forum emceed by Johnston, he revealed that the
Commission had pulled out an old Petition for Rulemaking submitted by a ham
in Texas that had lain unacted-on for several years, and assigned it an
RM-number, asking the FCC to outlaw AM phone on the amateur bands. The
subject of Johnston's presentation that year was that the amateur community,
with their newly-acquired computer word processors, was flooding the
Commission with frivolous rulemaking petitions.
He used as an example, the AM power issue. His line went something like
this: "Here, we have two petitions. One, submitted by an individual in
Texas, wants to eliminate AM altogether, while another, submitted by the
ARRL, seeks to CHANGE THE RULES to allow AMers to run twice as much power
as everybody else." Johnston's deceptive strategy was to imply that the FCC
was going to be even-handed in the matter and dismiss both petitions.
Fortunately for American Morse enthusiasts, someone contacted the people
presently in charge at the FCC, and they essentially told him that Johnston
didn't know what he was talking about, and that American Morse was still
legal on the amateur bands, as long as the stations identify using the
regular International Morse Code.
For more on this story, go to:
http://www.kb6nu.com/american-morse-illegal-on-the-ham-bands/
http://www.kb6nu.com/more-on-american-morse-on-the-amateur-radio-bands/
Note: the individual in question is John B. Johnston, not Gary Johnston.
Don k4kyv
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