License Exam Quiz #287
de Steve, AE8AT

I will apologize in advance for the circuitous route to the quiz topic this week. I like to read historic documents around the date they made their mark on American history. As it happens, I am reading George Washington’s Farewell Address, which was not delivered but appeared in print on 19 September 1796. Technology then being fairly primitive by today’s standards, print was the mass communication of the day. Printing of course meant having to manually arrange individual letters in the press, manually load single sheets of paper, etc. all to “mass produce” the newspaper. This was Gutenberg’s technology of circa 1450 still the state of the art some 350 years later (and beyond)! Perhaps some of you have realized the connection to radio here is Morse Code. The way we got the letter E to be a single dit, and the letter T to be a dah, was by how many individual letters it took to print newspapers. The most common letters at the printing press were given the shortest combination of dits and dahs in Morse code. There was no better way of counting which letters were most frequent. In James Gleick’s book “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” it is stated the Morse Code was about 85% efficient, although they did not say if they used as the denominator: modern American English; 1838 American English (when Morse invented the code); spoken vs. printed vs. transmitted...in any case this has gone on long enough. To the quiz!


T1B07 Which of the following VHF/UHF band segments are limited to CW only?
A. 50.0 MHz to 50.1 MHz and 144.0 MHz to 144.1 MHz
B. 219 MHz to 220 MHz and 420.0 MHz to 420.1 MHz
C. 902.0 MHz to 902.1 MHz
D. All these choices are correct


G2C05 What is the best speed to use when answering a CQ in Morse code?
A. The fastest speed at which you are comfortable copying, but no slower than the CQ
B. The fastest speed at which you are comfortable copying, but no faster than the CQ
C. At the standard calling speed of 10 wpm
D. At the standard calling speed of 5 wpm


E8C05 What is the approximate bandwidth of a 13-WPM International Morse Code transmission?
A. 13 Hz
B. 26 Hz
C. 52 Hz
D. 104 Hz



Answers:
T1B07 = A [FCC Part 97.305(a), (c)]
G2C05 = B
E8C05 = C