Hmm... access to the HF bands sounds nice. I think there is still a place for amateur radio, but that folks will see the allocated spectrum shrink as airwaves go up for bids. Especially as governments & private companies find new uses for radio devices.

At least with ham radio you don't have to worry about going over your minutes each month. <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

There isn't too much commercial interest in the more popular ham bands, especially HF. Shortwave broadcasters are dying off. Most military and commercial traffic that used to go via HF has long since moved to satellite systems. There's some interest in the 2m and 70cm bands, but in most urban areas, the trend is to move most agencies to 800MHz (or higher) trunked systems or get on a commercial network like Nextel. The higher bands might suffer, but I doubt there more than 1,000 hams in the U.S. that have ever been active on a band above 1GHz. I think our bands are relatively safe from being taken away. The 220MHz fiasco was probably an isolated incident. It'll be interference from adjacent frequencies that clobbers bands like 2.4GHz that keeps them from being used. Or rather, the lack of cheap easily modified commercial equipment that keeps the bands from being used.

There's still a lot of value to ham radio and there are many aspects of the hobby. It's easy to be an active ham for 20 years and not spend any time ragchewing with the old guys running a kilowatt on 75m. Most afternoons I can fire up my 5 watt PSK signal on 20m and have essentially an instant messager conversation with a random ham in Europe, South America or the Caribbean. I know it would be easier to go IM random foreigners with AOL/Yahoo but I doubt it would be as interesting. Or if that doesn't float your boat, for years I was involved in public service as a ham, helping with everything from walk-a-thons / bike rides to hurricane responses.

I'll just remind everyone:

The Rule changes do NOT go into effect until 30 days AFTER they are published in the Federal Register - figure that will be sometime between now and the first week of January - so these changes will occur sometime Late January or Febuary

I still think it's usefull to KNOW the code (I do- but I'm only a 5wpm extra), and it's interesting, but I don't think it should be required.

That said, I'd LIKE to see the Tech test get HARDER - with more "This is proper operating procedure" questions, and the eliminated "techinical" questions moved up into the general pool

I have been studying for my HAM radio test, and in the meantime I bought a radio scanner, to get familiar with the type of radio traffic out there. I was extremely disappointed - just a bunch of ranting libertarians, or people saying things like "I'm pulling into my driveway now". I love all things radio, but I never heard much to inspire me to study hard and get the test under my belt.

I guess it all depends on where you are as to what you will hear on a 2 m or 7cm repeater. Here in South Florida, I have a very active group I talk with every morning. Our traffic information has all the broadcast stations beat by a long shot. And after the Three Sisters (Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma) hit us, you could get dependable information on where to get food, which gas stations were operating, where the lines were while broadcast media was still busy patting itself on the back for the two day old forcast.

Its also different when you can do the talking as you have some control over the topic, just listening all the time can get tedious.

I hope you will go ahead and get your license, I've met a lot of nice people through amateur radio. I hope you won't deny yourself that.

Craig.

Absolutely. CW is another tool in the gear bag. Many have considered it outdated and superfluous, but when the chips are down, and all you have is low emergency power with terrible conditions, it's the best tool in the bag.

I don't see how you can say that a hobby that adds thousands of people to it's ranks each year is dying. It is changing but it is far from dead. It is still very useful. In my community a few years ago we had a terrible ice storm. The lexington KY police and fire department could not communicate with the electric utility company. There were so many calls to 911 that the phone lines were overloaded and people couldn't get a call in from one of the local shelters. Our local ham club handled about 5000 messages that week. One call was for an ambulance to come to a shelter for a man having a heart attack.
Enjoying ham radio is all about making friends with other hams that also happen to like to be prepared for emergencies.
It doesn't cost much to get into ham radio. Most folks get started for less than $500. I don't know of very many hams that spend anything like $30,000 on equipment.
I am not sure that this change is in the best interests of ham radio but I hope that it helps make the hobby more attractive to people with an interest in technology and preparedness.

How can it not be in the best interest of ham radio? What harm is there in not requiring people to take a morse code test? Please make me a list of problems it will cause.

I think ham radio progress is hampered by the old timers who are stuck in the mode of "we had to take it and so should you". How silly.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the code requirement is to "keep out the riffraff".

If you want to know what the riffraff sound like, listen to a CB on channel 19 for a few minutes.

You are absolutely correct about channel 19. However, any one of those truckers could have passed the test for their tech license if they wanted to -- but they still don't. The existing test is still enough of a barrier to keep out the riffraff, despite 2-meters being a lot clearer with a lot better range.

Morse code won't cause a bunch of CB'ers to suddenly rush to HF, any more than the existence of tech has cause a bunch of CB lids on VHF.

KG4ZUD