I wrote: >> I passed the Second Class exam almost 40 years ago, but my old study >> books for the exam indicate that the tests listed above were in place >> even before WWII. AFAIK, the only change occurred in the early 1990s >> when the FCC began giving credit for all of the above if the >> candidate held an Amateur Extra license.
Phil replied: > That credit was only for the code requirements (which I took advantage > of) not for the written elements which were different from the ham exam > elements contents. Of course...I should have written more clearly if my post implied otherwise. > The Telegraph exam contents remained the same as they were in > the 60s (or earlier) up until last year, the only change being > was that diagrams no longer had to be drawn after the testin > became privatized. I took the written elements once, the only radiotelegraph candidate at the Kansas City FCC office. The 100-question exam was 10 percent short answer and schematic draws. After the examiner graded all the multiple-choice questions and I passed from just those, he asked if I minded if he did mot grade the remaining 10 non-M/C questions...i.e. zero credit. I said OK. I wrote: >> That, of course, wasn't even remotely equivalent...I guess the FCC just >> got lazy. > No comment. I was a FCC code examiner for three decades and lazy > didn't apply. I have no doubt...I was not casting aspersions on the examining staff. They were not the ones who made the decision in the early 1990s to accept a ham 20-wpm read-only test requiring (after 1980) answering 10 multiple-choice questions about plain-language text, in place of the far more rigorous commercial Morse tests. >> I took several ham Morse exams at the FCC in the late 1960s and early >> 1970s. Contrary to some claims otherwise, I do not ever remember the >> 13 wpm test being random code groups on a ham exam. That is far more >> difficult than plain language to a ham new to Morse. > Code groups were never part of ham exams at any speed. Exactly! Yet some report, even here in the past few days, that their ham Morse exams were random character code groups. Thanks for information to the contrary that can be neither doubted nor disputed! 73, Mike / KK5F ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
