It's time to allow Techs on parts of HF Phone bands.

 Past it, rather. 

OK, I'm quite aware that this is not going to be a popular commentary among some of the older hands, but it is time to allow Techs some small slice of HF Phone.  And obviously I'm not alone in the thought that it's actually PAST time for that move.

For the last 50 years, we've been shown happy Ham radio operators talking (Note the emphasis) with folks all over the world. But let folks get their first license, and what do they find? That they're not allowed phone on any of the bands that will reliably make those connections. 

True, 10m, which is the lowest band they can use Phone or digi modes on, is open just now, but let's face it... that's not true for well over half of the 11 year cycle. And yet, we get folks wondering why Techs aren't sticking with the program? 

Well, DUH!!  ...given the bait and switch, who would?

Damned few.  

I'm suggesting that a large number of people look at what they get with the technician license and they're simply walking away without bothering to even take the test. That's why I say I'm not as concerned about the already existing techniciansas  I am concerned about people we could be attracting to the hobby. 

And while there are some who suggest that the rules.... what techs get and what they don't... are clearly spelled out.... think about what a tech knows and doesn't know.... their inexperience is precisely why they're techs.

It's spelled out, all right..... To a group of folks, the majority of which are people who do not have the experience or understanding yet of what those privileges actually ARE, and so what they can and what they cannot do, only after they make the commitment.  Where do you think the large number of SHTF folks come from who laughably believe that the 2m HT is going to get to their family 200 miles away, are coming from? Obviously, they were attracted by what they SAW and the image presented to them...., not what they read and in any event,  clearly did not understand.

So, the ARRL in response to this, came up with a well designed and thought out plan in 2008 to deal with the problem, with the idea of making getting that first ticket more attractive.

Here's a preview:

ARRL has asked the FCC to expand HF privileges for Technician licensees to include limited phone privileges on 75, 40, and 15 meters, plus RTTY and digital mode privileges on 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters. The FCC has not yet invited public comment on the proposals, which stem from recommendations put forth by the ARRL Board of Directors’ Entry-Level License Committee, which explored various initiatives and gauged member opinions in 2016 and 2017.

“This action will enhance the available license operating privileges in what has become the principal entry-level license class in the Amateur Service,” ARRL said in its Petition. “It will attract more newcomers to Amateur Radio, it will result in increased retention of licensees who hold Technician Class licenses, and it will provide an improved incentive for entry-level licensees to increase technical self-training and pursue higher license class achievement and development of communications skills.”

As was fairly well expected, the proposal didn't fare well once the OT's got hold of it.Indeed, the proposal still sits in Limbo to this day.. Not the commission's doing, mind... if they figured it was a bad idea, they'd have killed it outright.  But the ARRL, who initially supported the idea, backed off, once the  responded to pressure from the guys who had to walk uphill barefoot through 2 feet of snow to get to school, and then home again, and figure because THEY were made to suffer everyone else should, too. So, the leauge stopped stopped pushing the proposal.  Now, I asked (both then and now, as did others) who does the system as now established, serve?

I will point out that most who want techs to get a small slice of HF phone aren't pushing for quite so generous a portion as this 2008 ARRL proposal, but frankly recent events have left me with the idea that making it smaller isn't going to help convince the OT's to get on board with the proposal. I'll also point out that techs are not the ones pushing for this, but generals. ... people who have little to nothing to gain, other than a larger ham Op population.

Rob, VK4HAT, suggests.... and I think rightly....

..... But it does serve someone, it serves to keep people off our bands .....(...) The proof that these statements are true can be found in the many posts saying Nothing to fix here. Just Make Them Upgrade. It serves the political agenda of all newbies are lazy and stupid. They do not deserve to be included with us because we walked uphill in snow both ways to the fcc.

Frankly, what we're seeing here is older hams protecting their fiefdoms, while ignoring the damage being done to Ham radio as a whole. Think this isn't the US/THEM "Bubble" mentality? That it doesn't go back to a time before most of us were born? Observe from QST, from I think October of 1956.... (PDF), "Your Novice Accent".  Tell me about how the "US v THEM BS hasn't been around long before most of us were alive.

Kurt, AC0GT points out:

The reasons for treating Technician as a "second class citizen" appears to have shifted over time but there's been reasons stated for this treatment for a long time. The Technician license was from the start something of a parallel path to the old way of climbing the ladder on licensing and by being the newcomer it wasn't well received. The old path was "bottom up" with limited privileges on HF and then climbing up to getting more HF privileges and then some privileges above 30 MHz. Technician was "top down", starting with privileges above 30 MHz and then later gaining access to HF. With such a deep culture in Amateur radio at the time of people learning to start with Morse code and HF this was not well received. With the Morse code testing persisted for so long then so did this culture. I expect that the Morse code testing persisted as long as it had in large part because the licensing selected for people that liked Morse code, this thinking of Morse code skill being the primary measure of an Amateur radio operator created a positive feedback loop of maintaining that measure in the licensing.

What I see breaking this culture of treating Technician as a second class citizen is the "aging out" of people steeped in this thinking as well as the bifurcation of the culture with the licensing allowing each "tribe" to live in their own bubble. With so little intermingling of these "tribes" there's likely to be a loss of some of the continuity of culture in Amateur radio. This loss of continuity has some pluses and minuses but it was the choice of the "old school" to create this discontinuity by hiding in their exclusive portions of the RF spectrum, and by not being all that welcoming to newcomers in clubs and events.

They made this bed and now they have to sleep in it. They could have taught the next generation to appreciate the history of Amateur radio but instead they chose to create a disdain for it.

And that's it, exactly.   And as Kurt points out there's a large number of older Hams who do not fall into this mold. But they tend to get shouted down, when the subject comes up.

The attitude we're discussing here is in reality,is the reason Hams never took advantage of the people living on 11m. Yes, the dreaded and much maligned CB crowd.  The OT HAM crowd created that monster, and shot themselves in the foot in the doing.

How?

To answer that a fairly well parallel bit of history is useful.  Consider the story of R. Caroline.
Wikipedia reports that....

Radio Caroline is a British radio station founded in 1964 by Ronan O'Rahilly and Alan Crawford initially to circumvent the record companies' control of popular music broadcasting in the United Kingdom and the BBC's radio broadcasting monopoly.^[1] Unlicensed by any government for most of its early life, it was a pirate radio station that never became illegal as such due to operating outside any national jurisdiction, although after the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 it became illegal for a British subject to associate with it.

The Radio Caroline name was used to broadcast from international waters, using five different ships with three different owners, from 1964 to 1990, and via satellite from 1998 to 2013. Since August 2000, Radio Caroline has also broadcast 24 hours a day via the internet and by the occasional restricted service licence. Currently they broadcast on 648 AM and DAB radio in certain areas of the UK: these services are part of the Ofcom small-scale DAB+ trials. Caroline can be heard on DAB+ in Aldershot, Birmingham, Cambridge, Brighton, Glasgow, Norwich, London,^[2] Portsmouth, Poulton-le-Fylde and Woking. Caroline can also be listened to over the internet including via music players such as Amazon echo (Alexa).

In May 2017, Ofcom awarded the station an AM band community licence to broadcast on 648kHz to Suffolk and north Essex;^[3] full-time broadcasting, via a previously redundant BBC World Service frequency and transmitter mast at Orford Ness, commenced on 22 December 2017.^[4]

Radio Caroline broadcasts music from the 1960s to contemporary, with an emphasis on album-oriented rock (AOR) and "new" music from "carefully selected albums". On 1 January 2016, a second channel was launched called Caroline Flashback, playing pop music from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.

So, essentially, the station existed, on legally tenuous ground, in response to GOVERNMENT not giving folks what they wanted.  They found a way around the problem. 

. 

Similarly, CB gave radio hobbyists a means of doing what they are about... using phone, shooting some DX without going through the arcane and outdated code testing of the day. Argue if you will about the legalities involved, but in the end, such arguments are beside the point. In both cases, we have proof in hand that you do not solve a problem by simply passing a law.and that when laws become unreasonable, people tend to become outlaws.

Now, it will be argued that code testing is long gone. I'll stipulate to that point, and say it shoould have been gone long before it was removed from the books. And while technically true, in reality enforced code is still with us, in the form of restrictions on where the phone and digi modes can be used by newcomers to the hobby.  Forget phone or Digi on ham band below 10m, if you're a tech.  The picture we have been given for decades of happy Ham ops talking to friends all over the world proves to be an empty promise unless YOU walk both ways to school, barefoot through the snow, too.

(I will quietly suggest that that's the only reason that the screaming about the elimination of code testing wasn't louder than it was, back in the day.... They knew Techs would still be corralled.  (And by the way I made that same suggestion about the time the code tests got dropped. )

I am reminded that during the Napoleonic wars, the British army had similar issues to deal with. Most of the officer corps was of the aristocracy. God forbid that somebody should come along from the ranks and be raised up based on performance to be an officer, because that person would be a rank outsider, and would be considered "not one of us"

The message is clear:

LEARN CW. YOU WILL SUBMIT.

Yeah, some folks will be offended when I say that. I really don't care, because I'm more I'm offended that it is the reality.  The (rather obvious) underlying theme is "Not One Of US" and "you are not worthy"  So much for Ham radio as a welcoming hobby.

Of course, techs are supposed to be grateful for this  abuse. There are some people who simply need a lower class to beat up on. The need for justification is stronger with some people than with others. Also, there is the idea that Techs are being set up for failure. Give the newbies the hardest mode to learn, and tell them they can't have any appreciable DX until they do.... and the majority will up and quit. That explains the number of inactive tech tickets. It all serves to keep the techs separated, and protect the HF bands from "intruders".

 

I've commented in the past about a serious lack of Elmering. Think about the connection between that and the attitudes I'm speaking of, here.  

What is the result of this nonsense? If current trends continue, in 10 years time tech is 70% of all licenses, in 20 years its 80% of all licenses. When everyone is a newbie license, how do you upgrade to general and extra when it requires 3 extras to sit an extra exam session? Maybe that won't be so large a problem when the majority of techs don't bother to renew their ticket, which is also a factor attributable to barring techs from HF outside of CW.

As AC0GT suggests:

The way the licensing shifted into a hazing ritual was not that people were able to operate on the air at 13 WPM but that they passed the 13 WPM test to get General or Advanced. These people didn't study Morse code so they could operate CW, they studied so they could get the exclusive spectrum for HF phone. The reason the government went along with keeping the Morse code testing for so long was a combination of not wanting to get hate mail from people that wanted to keep the Morse code hazing ritual, the general slow movement of government, and the FCC database of those trained in Morse code might come in handy for the government should the Cold War get a bit warm and they'd need to start drafting people into the military again.

The people that clung on to Morse code testing as their means to measure status leaned on the FCC not wanting hate mail and the inherent slow moving nature of government agencies to keep their hazing ritual as long as they could. Again, this wasn't about being able to operate CW on the air but that the individual proved their worth by taking the Morse code test. Those that actually cared about operating CW looked to how well someone used Morse code on the air, not the FCC database as their measure of value. When the FCC made it clear they were removing the Morse code testing then some of the people wanting the hazing ritual let the mask slip and clearly stated the reason they wanted the Morse code testing was to have that hazing ritual for entry.

The last remaining remnants of the old hazing ritual is the current Technician privileges, because of that there's people that will cling tightly to not changing anything.

Indeed. And those making those arguments for not changing anything claim that the reason they support such restrictions is that the quality of Ham operations and operators will go down.

Really? Down below, say, this?

Of course such nonsense is NOT limited to one spot on 40m, they are simply handy examples.I've seen personally, examples of such on other bands.  So have most of us.

So, you believe giving a small portion of HF as a place for techs to learn, is going to spoil the broth? And you believe CB is the trailer trash of radio? You will forgive me, perhaps, if I fail to stand and salute.

 Lets be clear, here.
This is not about giving techs a "Handout".
This is not giving out freebies.
This is about bringing more folks into the hobby, and keeping them interested.
This is also not a call to give techs the keys to the kingdom.
Indeed, this is not even a call to instate the 2008 proposal as written.

Look, guys....The question is NOT the difficulty of the testing process, as is so often used as a derisive claim.

The REAL issue is what you get once you go through that process, which in practical terms is akin to being provided the sleeves from a vest. It's been pointed out often enough that there are lots of Techs who stay at that level and / or drop out, outright. I have long thought as you.... that they get in and decide "why bother".

The larger issue, though, there are far more prospective Hams who ,upon looking at what you get for going through that process before even taking the tests, don't bother at all, Huge turn off, particularly when there's other avenues such as the much derided 11m, GMRS, FRS etc. The thing that (apparently) goes unnoticed by many is you can't get them to upgrade if you're not getting them in, in the first place.

The question before us, (and has been for a long time) is whose purpose does the current structure serve?

From where I sit it's clearly not Ham radio's future that benefits.


What's being called for here is merely a small slice of one or two bands that actually have some DX in them more than half the time. That's it.

Give them something to get a taste of DX. We will attract more flies with honey, than the vinegar  currently being offered.

Its well past time to make this happen.