Brer Ed Vance wrote to Brer Roy Witt about Re: Resurrected:

 RW>>> My 2nd Elmer was a friend of a friend, who gave me the
 RW>>> incentive to take the test for a Novice ticket, c1970 - WN6ABE
 RW>>> was a one year license with no renewal available, per FCC rules
 RW>>> at the time.

 EV>> Brer Roy,

 EV>> My Novice License had the same One Year rule.

 RW>> Did you upgrade before the one year expiration or did you skip
 RW>> the upgrade and wait intil later to do that.

 EV> Brer Roy,

 EV> I passed the Technician Test at Dayton Hamvention in May, one month
 EV> before my Novice license would expire.
 EV> I can't remember when the General License arrived that summer,
 EV> wheather it came before or after the Novice Ticket would have
 EV> expired.

Hmmm. I let my Novice ticket expire because I lost interest. I was too
busy being single and romancing the ladies. I had borrowed a pair of Drake
twins and returned those within a few months, never having fired them up.

 EV> ----snip----

 RW>> An aside to your story, while I and a close friend were sitting
 RW>> in the FCC's exam room at their offices in San Diego c1978, we
 RW>> were taking the General code exam. The code test included a 10
 RW>> question test that asked about the content of the code that we
 RW>> had copied. One question stands out in my mind as 'the question
 RW>> that broke the camel's back'... The question was; how many
 RW>> watts did the sender say he was using?

 EV> The Code Tests I took in the late 1950's wasn't of the Q&A Type.

I think the FCC updated the tests to stimulate your brain, making sure
that you knew the content of the session, rather than finding a number of
characters copied correctly in a row.

 EV> Back then to pass the CW Exam IIRC 65 characters straight had to
 EV> be written on the paper.

6as5d4d54as65das5d4fad65d4fa5s44f34sd534asf4sdf44s5df454f5s3sa4f

But, what did it say?

 EV> When I took the Amateur Extra Test it was a Q&A Test.
 EV> I passed the CW but failed the Written Part, and walked out of the
 EV> room with a Temporary Amateur Advanced License.

I really never aspired to have a EXTRA class license, since there's no
advantage to having one if you're not at all interested in using CW ...
The only advantage I've found is that you could get a 1x2 or 2x1 call
sign, but then after running out of those, they began to issue 2x2 calls,
which I already had with my Advanced call - KB6PI...

 EV> I only tried for the Extra because of someone who I felt was a bigger
 EV> LID than I am was always on the air bragging about his being an
 EV> Extra.

I ignore those kind of people. In SD we had a person who not only had an
Amateur license, he also owned a commercial mountain top where he had
built facilities to house commercial radio and TV services and Amateur
radio was a second thought, but in his kindness, he leased space to a
local HAM 2mtr club. I had a repeater on the tallest mtn top, but it
wasn't owned by that guy, who spent hours on the HAM clubs repeater,
giving his 'love me' speal over the lease and bad-mouthing the repeater
users.

 EV> -------snip---

 RW>> Another friend, sitting across the room from us failed that
 RW>> test (his 5th try) and hadn't gotten past Technician before I
 RW>> moved to Texas in 2004. When the code test was no longer
 RW>> required, I see that he has made it to Extra Class. I have no
 RW>> idea why, as he kept his old WB6xxx call sign and can't
 RW>> communicate in CW...

 EV> Before the FCC allowed Hams to keep their Call Sign no matter where
 EV> they lived, I kept my K4 call from Kentucky and because I had moved
 EV> to Indiana I got a Secondary License with a WA9 call.

Those were no longer available when I got licensed. I often wondered why
anyone would need two calls.

 EV> When my folks moved from the QTH my K4 license showed I asked the FCC
 EV> to Cancel that License and make the WA9 call my Primary License.

Hmmm.

 EV> In the 1970's or 1980's when I learned that I could exchange my WA9
 EV> license for a One by Three license without paying anything, I asked
 EV> the FCC for a 1X3 Call Sign figuring I'd get a K9 call and they gave
 EV> me the W9 call I have now.

Beginning in the 90s sometime, they began to issue 'vanity' calls of your
choice. This is how I got licensed as K6RXT and a few years after I moved
to Texas, K5RXT was available, so I applied for that one and got it. The
former licensee lived in Louisiana and went silent key.


         R\%/itt - K5RXT

"It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and
 if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain."
     Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

 Thus, we have "Climate Change Science" - which isn't capable of
 explaining anything.


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