My perspective on the code issue spans about 50 years now. When I was 11 years old I discovered amateur radio. I already was interested in science and electricity but did not really have a grasp of what electronics was all about. My entry was through Popular Electronics magazine which had a good mix of entry level to advanced projects as well as simple explanations of these projects and also information on amateur radio, including short stories that often brought amateur radio into the picture.
The difficult part was the morse code requirement which I did not find very interesting. A few years later I learned morse code in the Boy Scouts but it was done with the pictograph approach and while that eventually helped me pass the 5 wpm Novice test but locked me into a slow speed since I did not realize that I could never do much more than 8 or 10 wpm using this technique. Being quite low income, I simply did not have enough money for good equipment and struggled to make a few daytime contacts on 80 and 40 with a few crystals. I never found even one other person close to my age who was interested enough in ham radio to work toward a license and this was in a community of about 5,000 with a surrounding rural population. After my Novice ran out I took the Technician which was also by mail. This was actually the General written exam but at the 5 wpm for the code. In college I operated 2 meter AM phone and participated in my first disaster activity with the Mississippi River flooding of 1965. Other local hams worked 2 meter phone, but most were active with HF. I was in awe of many of these folks with their ability to send CW at 13 wpm and even more. I was in the military after college and let my license expire when overseas on Wake Is., never even meeting the other ham or two who would run phone patches for some of the military personnel. Because of my continued interest in electronics (as a hobby mostly), I was experimenting with LF designs popularized by Ken Cornell, and wound up getting my old Allied Radio code record that my mother had saved all those years and got relicensed as a Novice in 1980. Surprisingly, I found the CW to be much more enjoyable and even got involved a little bit in the slow speed traffic nets. I had enough income that I could afford to go to the FCC examining station some 150 miles away and take my General Class test in only a few months after being relicensed. In the next few years I passed my Commercial General Radiotelephone license and then working everyday for over a year practicing my CW, I was able to return one more time to the FCC examing station and pass my Advanced and Extra written exams and 20 wpm CW in one test session. If I had not done it that day, I would likely have never gone back again. This allowed me to be the first VE in my area and set up the first test sessions. A number of the hams who I had been in awe of years ago, now came to the first test session and upgraded to Extra. Now we had a critical mass of new Extra Class hams in our area for future test sessions. The truth is that for people like me, where CW does not come easily, there is no way that I would have expended that much energy and time to acquire that skill unless I was forced to do it. Now I have a moderate skill but will never be a CW DXer type or QRQ savvy operator. But I do copy some CW almost everyday and find it a nice skill to have that almost no one else in the world has except for a relatively small group of us. That group is shrinking. All you have to do is see how many fewer CW signals there are on the bands, traffic nets, etc. CW proficiency was made a requirement for radio amateur licensing in the past because governments could insure a pool of CW proficient operators at basically no expense to the government. Since CW expertise no longer has the same value to governments as it once did, the need to induce people to push themselves to become better operators is no longer there. I do not believe that many new hams will become involved with CW. Yes, some will, but the more technically inclined, who may not have interest in CW, will not. CW was an effective filter to keep out those who were not really motivated individuals to get a license. However, some of the somewhat neurotic personality traits that are required to learn the technical and code proficiency may not always lend themselves to what we would call well balanced or well rounded individuals. It doesn't filter those kind of folks. But it was effective at insuring that highly technical folks, who had no interest in CW, were filtered out. But, because the license is so incredibly easy to get now, with drastically lower technical and zero code proficiency and locally available exams, we can expect to have more entrants than we would have with all the former requirements. But we may have less than in the past because there may not be that many who are truly that interested. Adjusted for the population, there are a lot more hams today than back in the 1960's when I started out. A large portion of the new entrants of today do not tend to stay with amateur radio. They have much less invested than those of us who had to really work hard to pass all the requirements. So people with a more superficial interest will get a license, but then will not be very active (or even never become active at all) and may let their license expire. On the other hand, if they had kept the old requirements, there would be a much smaller number of new entrants, perhaps only 10 or 10% of what we have now and there would be a huge decline in the number of licenses, threatening out existence. And you would lose the technical folks, the young folks, and lower income folks, who would be unwilling or unable to jump through the hoops that we used to have to jump through. 73, Rick, KV9U Brad wrote: > >Whatever next Danny? Should we be able to read punched paper tape at >20WPM before operating RTTY? Coastal Radio operators had to do it for >their licence. > >Or perhaps touch typing at 60wpm before any permitting other Digital >keyboard mode, or a Photography course for SSTV? > >Considering some of the accents I've heard from the USA, perhaps an >assessment by a speech therapist before being permitted Phone? ;-) > >I too, have always hated the compulsory nature of CW being a hurdle >and keeping me away from the bigger chunks of HF, but I passed it 18 >years ago and never used it since. Now, I find it more interesting >and am considering practising again. I've never understood what was >so special about Morse Code that it required a separate exam of it's >own, and why so many hams were ready to preclude so may other good >operators from HF because of it. It sounds like religious snobbery. > >This time, new operators will be on CW because they love it, not >because they HAD to learn it. By the way, it's always good to bear in >mind the dictionary definition of the word Amateur. It doesn't mean >Unprofessional, as some may think. > >Brad VK2QQ > > > > >
