FCC Ponders Removing Morse Code Reqs for Amateur Radio Licenses

Nalez writes "This story on the ARRL website outlines six petitions currently in front of the FCC to drop the Morse code requirement for the amateur radio license exams. Currently the ability to do Morse code at 5 words per minute is required to operate on the high frequency bands (below 30Mhz), which are the bands that propagate best around the world." While this may or may not attract more people to ham radio, it will make it easier for the novice to use packet radio devices.

Technician class?

[Hayzeus]

I think there is no MC requirement already for this type of license, right?

Re:Technician class?

[Detritus]

Not now. But if you want to operate HF, you still need to pass a 5 WPM morse code test.

Why?

[Qbertino]

The Morse code is almost common knowledge, imho. It's a good basic skill and can be somewhat usefull if you can count on a substancial amount of people being able to morse. It's not to far fetched having people be able to morse at 5 wpm in order to get a HAM licence.
And why would one want to lower the entry level for HAM? If someone really wants to do HAM, learning to morse won't be a barrier, but the requiements keeps the twits away from HAM and that probably maintains a good 'quality of service'. For the lack of a better word. It's just like Fido Net: People where required to give their real name and address and therefore noise and junk was/is *very* low on Fidonet.

Re:Clarification ..

[ProfMoriarty]

- Why was morse code originally required for amatuer radio operators?

IIRC - it served several purposes but primarily kept poor operators off the airwaves. It also showed that you had "technical prowess" ...

- How often is morse code used today?

Given the fact that it is easily discernable, takes very little bandwidth (4 * WPM) = Hz, and global, it is used quite a bit. In fact with my handheld, I can pick up Morse on 7.110 (or so) just about anytime.

- What advantages does morse code have, vs other forms of radio communication?

I defer to the above answer for most of this ...

For those of you who can't read morse code

[jbarket]

It's just a link to goatse, a couple of bad jokes (in soviet russia, morse code you!), and one of those huge ass GNAA posts. Who had the time to sit down and read one of those GNAA posts, let alone translate it into morse code, I have no idea. But thanks to the clever work of Samuel Morse, I'm making the worst joke of my /. career and burning my karma away.

support this

[Rock Ridge]

An int'l radio body recently dropped the code requirement. This is a good thing, even though I learned code to get a general license when about 13 years old. It was easy for me to learn, but really isn't necessary if the potential licensee wants to experiment with radio -- there are many ways to do that without code: packet radio, rtty, tv, ham satellite, vhf/uhf/shf/ehf.

Re:Technician class?

[sinnergy]

Uh...

As a technician, you have full band priveleges on every band from 6m on up through the GHz ranges.

Anyone who's at least a tech. should know this.

Granted, most techs only work on these bands, but that's a different story.

kc8rwb

Re:Technician class?

[Anonymous Coward]

The technician class offers everything above 30 Mhz that the General and the Extra class offers. The main reason one would get the CW done would be to have access to Transmit on the sub-30 Mhz bands.

Re:The inevitability of it ... sigh

[Dun Malg]

However, I imagine the Russians must have created a cyrllic version of morse code.

Interestingly enough, they use standard morse code and map the cyrillic letters to their closest phonetic counterparts in the roman alphabet. I was a signal intelligence analyst in the army in the cold-war days and even the Red Army used standard morse. They did everything via code tables and didn't spell out actual words very often so it wasn't a big deal for them.

Re:The inevitability of it ... sigh

[Detritus]

There is a fair amount of CW jargon and text that is so common that it is language independent. You can operate at a limited level with no knowledge of the other operator's native language.

Why Morse?

[eriko]

Well, the historical reasons for morse are many, but the reason for the 5WPM requirement (and it used to much harder -- the top classes required 20WPM) was treaty.

Long distance HF bands aren't useful, unless everyone agrees what those bands are -- no use having the US hams on 40M, if the UK is using that same band for broadcast. So, the amatuer bands were set by treaty. This treaty also had a morse requirement. However, this year, the World Radiocommuncation Conference, held every so often to review things like this, dropped the code requirements for the HF bands.

I agree that Morse as a requirement has passed it's time. It is a bandwidth efficent and noise resistant mode -- but there are better now, such as PSK31. I've copied 90% of a PSK31 transmission that was so weak I could barely see it on a waterfall display -- never mind actually hearing it.

Note that eliminating the Morse code requirement wouldn't eliminate Morse code from the bands. There are segements of the ham bands that are CW only. Those who work with low power (QRP) are very fond of CW morse.

ITU has removed the treaty requirement for morse

[Anonymous Coward]

The recent World Radio Conference in Geneva removed the requirement for a morse test pass when operating below 30MHz. This is because commercial morse operations ceased some years ago and the need for amateur morse transmissions to be readable by commercial operators has thus gone.

About 6 or 7 countries including Switzerland, the UK, Norway, Germany, Belgium and Holland have already changed their regulations to reflect the new reality, the US has not because of the way that the FCC docket and petition system works.

As to comments about this wrecking amateur radio, well I don't think so because there have been no-code licences in various countries for many years. Since 1964 in the UK for instance. It hasn't led to the end of the world as we know it.

Lots of people (well, all right, a vociferous minority) are agin' it because they had to take the test and why the hell shouldn't everyone else for ever. But pragmatism will eventually make them accept what is going on.

As for the hobby dying, well show a teenager someone talking to Australia using a radio the size of a small suitcase, an antenna the length of the garden and a morse key and they will usually say that they can do that with their mobile phone.

The world has moved on, little new technology has appeared in amateur radio due to the need for technical skills that you just can't have in all amateur's shacks at home (unless you buy ready built commercial kit) and you see that it is going to shrink unless something injects new interest.

I suppose that the communications we have now make AR look dated, but then that only works until the power is out and the only people with charged backup batteries are radio amateurs.

Maybe that will save the hobby, but sadly many of those that help out with emergency comms have, shall we say, a rather military mindset and like wearing camouflage gear and strutting about trying to be important.

Like many potentially extinct species one has to consider exactly how much of a loss their passing will be, it might not be noticed much.....

Re:Restrictions on use of the Ham bands

[Anonymous Coward]

Amateur radio is never meant to be a private medium for communication. It's more like IRC, a world wide chat zone. There is an exception to the encryption rule. If you have a satellite in orbit, you are allowed to encrypt your control or telemetry transmissions between the satellite and your ground station.

Re:Not before time....

[Mr. No Skills]

Some of the sister organizations have already moved this way. The international body has dropped the requirement, and Switzerland has dropped the requirement and I think England might soon. http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2003/07/22/1/ [arrl.org]

Re:probably too late to save the hobby

[JGaiser]

Old farts that complained when a group of us brought up Linux/AX.25 networks on packet radio. Because they didn't know/didn't care to learn how to filter out the tcp/ip packets, we were screwing up the dot matrix printers which they used to make running logs.

Old farts on voice getting upset when you tried to use "their" frequency to do something other than talk about the latest disease/death/perscription.

There were a lot of helpful and knowledgable men and women in Amateur Radio also, but it just got to be fun dealing with the minority.

Not completely up to the FCC ...

[dougmc]

The morse code requirement was part of an international agreement between the US and many other countries -- a treaty. So, it wasn't always up to the FCC to remove it -- only in the last few months has it become an option, because --

A major step forward occured on July 5, 2003, when WRC-03 adopted changes to the ITU Radio Regulations that remove the international requirement that all administrations require Morse tests, leaving that determination to the individual administrations, but the work does not end there.

(from nocode.org)

Other countries are already moving in this direction, so it sounds like it's just a matter of time before morse code is removed entirely or reduced even more.

More details here [arrl.org] and here [perens.com] and here [nocode.org].

For the sake of completeness, I'm KD5YRD, just Technician class. I've passed the General and Extra tests, but failed the Morse code test when I tried it (yesterday!) ... so I'll need to work on it bit more (perhaps in two weeks I'll try again.) The written tests are quite simple, especially since you have access to all possible test questions, but the morse code part can be a lot harder for many people, even though 5 wpm is extremely slow.

In any event, don't get the idea that you need to know morse code to do ham radio, even today. You absolutely do not -- the Technician class license does not require it, and gets you access to many (most?) of the `fun' things that ham radio has to offer. But you may want to learn it eventually -- you'll hear a lot of it even mixed in with voice communications.