Jay, I have no problem with people who are religious, even if it is CW. They can be religious CW operators. What I object to is anyone who wants to shove their religious beliefs down my throat or force me to become a member of their religion. I object to Taliban CW operators or their fellow travelers. They are entitled to their beliefs and I will not mock them or attack them. Hey, I am a liberal! And I work CW DX and get into CW contests but I am not a good CW operator and do not expect to go to CW heaven. Nor do I expect to get into FOC. I am not going to gloat about CW being dropped because I did not push to get it dropped. Nor did ARRL. I realize full well that this is a real blow to some guys and a few gals but they should have seen it coming. I told a lot of clubs that I have spoken to in the last two years that I expected the FCC to drop CW testing. They told us that years ago. (see my BTW below.) I have a real fear that to we (the ARRL) may become so fearful of those who are really Taliban and want to wrap our woman up in red white an blue burkas and use nothing but CW that we will go along with a push to make the exam harder. Please, let's do a reality check here. Today's radios are so complicated and use SMT components that most of us cannot fix. Why would we ever want to put questions on the exams which only a bench technician with a dual trace storage scope and a computer program designed to mimic the test points in a particular radio could answer. It is no longer like the old days when we fixed our own radios. That is gone. We now have UPS lights on our radio. When the light comes on call UPS to pick up the radio and we ship it back to the manufacturer who replaces the defective module. Almost no one traces a problem down to the component level anymore and replaces the component. That has long ago ceased to be cost effective. Making exams harder is NOT the answer, it is just another problem. Please, let us not go there. BTW: The FCC signaled that they would drop the CW testing requirement back in 1999 or 2000 when the dropped the CW testing speed down to 5 WPM. At that point the great one at FCC, Bill Cross, after he debunked all the reasons given by the Taliban for keeping the code said that the sole reason for keeping the CW testing requirement was the iinternational treaty language. When that went away more than two years ago, it was pretty obvious what the FCC would do. It's just that as slugs they move slowly. None of should be surprised by the FCC decision. We can be annoyed at their lack of sped but we can't be surprised unless e did not read the initial document closely or entirely. 73 de Frank....N2FF...... Bellows wrote:

I have to disagree with Frank to a certain extent on this. CW may not be a religion, but many adherents view it as if it were a religion, in the sense its followers are true believers. To them belief is a matter of faith not necessarily fact in the scientific sense.