[Lowfer] 20 Meter band

[John Davis]

As with anything else where people are involved, it varies by location and
the time when one observes, I guess.  The point is that nearly ALL ops
PRESENTLY in the 20m and 75m bands, both the good and the bad, passed a
Morse test at one time.  Its ability to weed out "undesirables" is thus open
to some question.

Conversely, most of what I hear on 2 meters locally is not so bad.  Sure,
there's a lot of idle chatter*--which I also hear on every other band, in
between contests, which is a whole 'nother subject.  Most of it, although
largely pointless, is at least well mannered.  We've been fortunate enough
in this area to have a lot of code-vested old timers on 2m who take the time
to guide newcomers toward good operating practices.  (Same as happens in the
code-only bands, or so I hear.)  But there's also a lot of really good stuff
on 2m around here that I hope to participate in after I retire next year,
such as Skywarn and, yes, even a code practice net.

Moral: any generalization is only accurate part of the time...some less than
others.

John

(*When it comes to idle chatter, my "favorite" QSO of all time is one I
overheard on 160m between a bunch of OMs on SSB, complaining about the AM
net that was operating at the high end of the band.  I didn't know it was
possible to whine about wasted bandwidth for three hours straight, but they
did!  The AM net operated for 30 minutes, using roughly 5kHz-hours of
spectrum; while the sidebanders tied up 9kHz-hours complaining about it.
And that's not counting the extra bandwidth some of the "experts" were
occupying with significant amounts of splatter.)