[CW] Early Radio Operator Licensing

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

I think even today, Element 5 and 6 are the same 1947 examinations,
it's the equipment that was on the ships, the majority of the ships
had 1950s technology in the radio room, more modern ships had the
radio stations updated, but the designs were based on 1950s
technology, which was excellent - 10 second warm up vacuum tube 500
kHz transmitters, mechanical keying auto alarm transmitter, the auto
alarms were a mixture of some transistorized and a few were vacuum
tube and mechanical clock works.  It worked.

I took my T2 examination in 1977 and it had questions on Spark and Arc
- Bob Shrader's Electronic Communication had spark and arc in the
1950s 2nd edition of his book. The last edition was 1991
https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780070571570

Even if I failed the spark question, it was only one of 100 questions.
I think the passing grade was 76% I believe. I usually got about 94%
on my FCC tests and I actually did skip some questions like the one
where you had to change from phasors to imaginary numbers (square root
of negative one) for a Medium Wave vertical broadcast directive array
question in the first phone.  It was only one point and doing the math
for it took a half hour at least.

I remember I missed drawing the bypass capacitor across the DC supply
in an oscillator circuit for my 2nd telegraph - all that work and one
capacitor makes you fail!

73
DR

On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 5:01 PM Richard Knoppow <1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>    How did you happen to know the answers? I know a little about
> arc and spark but that's because I am interested in wireless
> history. I suspect many younger people have never heard of them.
>     Many years ago a friend and mentor built a working rotary arc
> for a museum exhibit. I got to key it. No wonder they were called
> rock crushers.
>     Its interesting that the FCC had such old tests.
>