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ham radio de-regulation; no, wait, please read it......
Topic Started: Mar 2 2007, 08:07 PM (111 Views)
Dominic Guglieme
the human MICROscope!!

In case you have not heard, the Federal Communications Commision has recently dropped the morse code requirements for ham radio operators.

Why do we care?

The way I see it, technology has advanced beyond the need for regulation in this case. Think about it. Do you need to know html in order to be on-line? Granted, most people at this board know some html, but there is no statutory requirement that we know it.

I do not have the numbers in front of me, but according to the report I heard, the number of ham operators has been dropping. (I suppose we can blame the usual suspects; television, video-games, the internet, and ever more hectic lives.) But, with fewer operators, there is less need to make licenses harder to acquire.

Ham radio, (which wikipedia describes simply as slang for amateur short-wave radio), in a way is the cultural ancestor to the computer. Think about it. Rather than spending late nights tapping away on a key-board and looking at a screen, one would spend late-nights turning dials and listening to whatever incoming signal came in through a set of ear-phones.

Just like the internet, one could meet people from any place in the world. Although, unlike the internet, which allows people to duplicate and track their communications, short-wave radio was influenced by such factors as weather, and even operator skill. A user had to know what they were doing, and how they did it last time, rather than typing an alphanumeric string into a browser. But, even all the skill in the world could not always work around unfavorable weather. On the other hand, the most complex url can be transcribed with relative ease, and will probably work every time it is used.

Like the early days of the internet, and some pages still use this dynamic, ham radio allowed (paradoxically) for open anonymity. Most blog pages do not require people to register before posting. They do however track IP numbers. Ham operators would tend to fall along certain places on a dial. There may not be a fixed name attached in either case, but there is an identifiable number. (Though IP numbers can be difficult to track if somebody posts from a public terminal.)

I do not realistically think that ham de-regulation will change much. Likely, the number of users will continue to shrink in favor of other forms of entertainment and communication. But, at least now there is no anachronistic qualification to getting a license. (The license itself is arguably an obstable.) And, who knows, perhaps more people will pick up on morse, just as some of us on-line types have picked up a bit of html.



Dom
-jus had a case of cold-sweats and hoping this is not food-poisoning.
Keep it local.


The healthiest leper in the colony is still very very sick.

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