ham radio?

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Tue Feb 15 17:00:55 2000

On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 05:05:26PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> Hey...all hope is not lost, there. I know *I* really enjoy CW; I
> can't imagine I'm the only one. It's fun, and that will never change!

I agree, although it's been a few years... Morse is great, you can use
*much* simpler equipment and get a readable signal through worse conditions
with less power. My main rig, last time I lived some place with a yard big
enough for wire antennas, was a CW-only Heath HW16, it was great. So simple
that even a doofus like me had some inkling of how it worked.

This may sound elitist but I really liked the fact that ham licenses had the
Morse code requirement, because it kept out the riff-raff. Forcing people
to learn to translate a cipher in their heads real time required a certain
amount of commitment, so by the time they got a license, they really valued
it and acted a lot more mature as a result. Meanwhile you could get a CB
license just by mailing $4 (or not even, once the FCC got busted for charging
fees), but of course that turned into 40 channels of impenetrable noise.

Hmm, what was the name of that guy who decided that having a ham license
w/o bothering to learn anything first was some kind of god-given right, so
he started using the freedom of information act to find out the answers to
the FCC tests and published them in books? I hope something bad happened
to him by now...

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Tue Feb 15 2000 - 17:00:55 GMT