Having been witness to a lot of dialog recently on the subject, I have observed that there is in the broadcast engineering community a lack of agreement about the purpose of FCC examinations for Amateur Radio licenses. To that aging demographic, there is an attitude heard often that there is no value any longer to an Amateur license because the questions are too simple, an in-depth understanding of the technology is not required, schematic drawings are no longer required of an examinee, etc. and therefore holding an Amateur license is not an indication of any scholarly understanding of the medium at all. On the other side are those who, I think correctly, argue that the purpose of Amateur licensing, perhaps especially entry level licensing, is to enable matriculation, not graduation. It is not a measure of achievement in technical self-training, but is the "ante up" that allows the self-training to *start*. It seems to me that the supporters of our Tech Enhancement proposal apply this metric, and the opponents hold the other one. 73, Chris W3KD On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 11:39 AM, G Widin <gpwidin@comcast.net> wrote:
It's clear that this document reflects a much different attitude about licensing, both from FCC and the amateur community. The licensee was *expected* to go find out things, and this worked because it was also the licensee's expectation of him- or herself. I suspect that this genie is out of the bottle--forever. 73, Greg, K0GW
On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 8:53 AM, Tom Frenaye <frenaye@pcnet.com> wrote:
When you get questions from people about the current Technician "entry" level license, you might want to use the attached (partial) copy of the 1951 ARRL License Manual. It had information for both the (new) Novice license and the Technician. The portion attached is the front cover and the three pages devoted to the Novice. That was it...
Compare the 1951 Novice to the present 2 pound, 400+ question, 350+ page publication we have today for the Technician. :-)
Hope this comes through OK, the scanned pages make a pretty large file...
-- Tom
===== e-mail: k1ki@arrl.org ARRL New England Division Director http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444 _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv
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