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Old 02-19-2008, 08:43 AM   #7
KE5NWT
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: SW Texas
Posts: 45
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I wish the Extra test was about proper proceedures, staion design and grounding, antenna design, propagation, and so on. I will never build radios, design circuits, build or repair amplifiers, ect. Just one look at the microscopic insides of radios nowdays explains why the "electronics" knowledge requirement is a thing of the past. I can clip a diode here and there for MARS mods, but even that takes a newtron microscope. Testing someone on grid capacitance, AND /OR gates, flux capacitors, x leading y 180º is, in my opinion, ludicrous. The days of resitors being 1/4 inch long where you could actuall solder them are gone. Now they look like a speck of salt or smaller.

Years ago when I took a week long school on how to operate police radar, we learned things like, width of the beam at x feet away, what could cause false readings, how to test for accuracy, how the beam saw the target.... not how to built the circuits, take them apart, create microwave generators.... The instructor put it this way "your not building the radar guns, you are operating them".

I have heard that more people are learning code now that it is not a requirement. I think the no-code test was a move in the right direction. I believe they need to rethink the sections in the extra test about the electronics, and make the operating, antenna building, proper proceedure sections of amateur radio more detailed and harder. The extra test should be hard, but not on things that most operators will ever do.
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Texas State RACES 32-463-G
KE5NWT
Uvalde County, Texas
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