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.

probably too late to save the hobby

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm a ham and never bother turning on my rig anymore. I get much more satisfaction out of computers and the internet.

Not before time....

[rjmx]

This move's at least 20 years late. While the rest of the communications world has moved on to much more efficient methods, the Amateur crowd has clung to 120-year-old technology. With any luck, this'll go through (although, knowing the ARRL and its sister organisations, I can't see them going down without a fight) and might even result in more tech types going for amateur licences.

.....Ron (ex-vk6zjm)

Morse code on the cell phone

[farnerup]

If I knew morse code, I would like to have a cell phone that understood morse code. I'm sure entering SMS messages would be a lot faster that pressing 1 three times for "c" and so on. The phone would need just a single button!

Re:Technician class?

[Dun Malg]

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

Yeah, but a Technician license only gives you access to the 2 Meter(VHF) and 70cm(UHF) bands. You have to be able to slap a stupid paddle arbitrarily fast enough to be deemed worthy to use the 6 Meter(HF) band. It's pretty lame, in my opinion. Like making drivers pass a test using stick-shift before letting them drive on the interstate highways, regardless of whether their car is manual or automatic transmission. It's a silly hold-over from the olden days. The world is no longer so disconnected that one would really ever NEED to send a carrier-wave message.

If these petitions go through...

[C A S S I E L]

...then - think about it - soon we'll never hear the nostalgic, reassuring aural tapestry of Morse Code ever again...

...oh, apart from those thousands of mobile phones bleeping out "SMS" daily to owners who have no idea what it means...

Re:Clarification ..

[laing]

1: Morse code is the simplest form of modulation that can convey intelligence. You don't need much in the way of circuitry to build a C.W. (continuous wave) transmitter. Ham radio is all about experimentation, do-it-yourself projects, and good will. The easiest way to get on the air is to build a C.W. transmitter.

2. Morse is still used extensively. Tune around the H.F. CW bands and you'll always hear lots of QSOs going on.

3. In addition to being a simple form of modulation, Morse is also very good at moving data through low SNR (signal to noise ratio) conditions. It's much easier to discern whether or not there is a C.W. tone present than to try to understand spoken language. Note: There are other digital modes which add FEC (forward error correction) and these are actually even more robust than Morse; but you can't do them without additional equipment. Morse communication can be accomplished without a computer.

Re:probably too late to save the hobby

[JGaiser]

I have to agree. I've held an Amateur Radio license twice in the past 30 years (WB7RHQ and N7PWF) and in both cases the old farts (and it has nothing to do with age) have ruined whatever interest I might have had.

I'm truly surprised that this proposal has reached this far. I used to constantly listen to the arguments that Morse Code was a necessary hurdle to prevent the riff-raff from entering the hobby. Morse Code was never a problem for me - I passed 20WPM to graduate from Naval Radioman School in 1966 - but only attempted to use it twice. Good Riddance.

Article: A Business Man's View

[wherley]

Here [eham.net] is an article at eham.net with one hams viewpoint and lots of comments. his bottom line - don't sweat the dropping of code requirement.

K9JRW

Re:Morse code on the cell phone

[kybosh]

Modern mobiles tend to use predictive text input these days - you only press the keys once for each letter and the phone works out the rest (not a bad success rate either) - you also get spell checking as a nice side effect.

Some of Nokia's ringtones are in morse code though - the 'Special' SMS tone is 'SMS SMS' and the 'Nokia' Ringtone spells 'Nokia' (proving that someone in Finland *almost* has a sense of humour)

Re:probably too late to save the hobby

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm a ham and never bother turning on my rig anymore. I get much more satisfaction out of computers and the internet.

Ditto. There's just really not any advantage to using it. I only turn on my radio for one weekend a year to help support a volunteer event for emergency medical communications. It would've been nice to chat with people during this past blackout, but alas I'm only a technician class so I need to bounce off a repeater and they were all in disaster mode to save power on battery/generators. If I had HF privileges I could've talked to people outside the blackout area from my car. I have no interest in learning morse code though so that's not an option for me (yet?).

It also doesn't help that amateur radio is a very elitist medium. The "old timers" treat anyone interested in getting into the field like they're n00bs as much as we would them getting into computers. I wouldn't mind playing around with APRS and packet radio, but it's hard to find any decent info and get help without being treated like a fucking moron.

As a kid...

[Funksaw]

As a kid, I was actually pretty interested in the idea of ham-radio. I loved the idea of communicating worldwide with people. (I suppose that's when the Internet came along, I took to it like a duck to water...) But, honestly, I couldn't get the morse code requirement. The way my brain works, it's hard for me to, well, memorize stuff. Calling it up on command would be even sillier. So I never got into it. Here's the thing though. We have typewriters. We have computers. You can still *use* morse code without *knowing* morse code - simply hook up a computer on your line, type your message, and have the computer encode all of the message to Morse. If one wants to recieve, that can be translated by computer also. Morse is a great transmission type - and great for redundancy in emergencies - but it's hard to learn and use. Instead, why not keep the positives of morse code, while taking away it's negative - it's hard-to-learn status? -- Funksaw

Re:Technician class?

[Bagheera]

Wrong.

Technician class gives you access to all the amature bands "above" (higher freq, shorter wavelength) 6 Meteres and includes the 6 meter band. This also includes the multi GHz bands where things like, say Wireless LAN, live.

While CW may have dubious value any more for "real world" work, it's still in use by a lot of Hams worldwide, and is one of the best ways to do QRP (low power) work. It takes minimal bandwidth and power to communicate with CW.

Another thing it does is put up a minimal barrier working the HF bands. While that may seem "lame" to you, it would suck royally to have the Ham bands turn into the CB bands. The 5 WPM requirement is not that hard to achieve, but it at least shows "you" have enough dedication to go through the trouble to actually learn something that didn't just come from a cram session for your test.

Good and Bad

[rikun]

I'm somewhat torn on this entire idea. First, I do agree with many people who believe that it's definitely quite old and not really neccesary at this point, however, I also agree with those who are saying that it COULD be useful. It is universal to some degree, and it doesn't require a huge degree of electronics to use. In any case, how much longer do you think radio stations and whatnot will even be AROUND? I've already seen some internet-based radio parts... it's probably only a matter of time. They're going to evolve or die, I believe. As to which, no idea.

This is why SETI wont work.

[epicstruggle]

Getting rid of mc just shows me that seti will more than likely never fullfil its goal of finding intelligent life outside this planet through radio waves (and/or other part of the spectrum). We have just shown that as we advance our knowledge we get rid of old forms of communications for far superior forms.

So its concievable that within 100 years that we will not be using any current communication median, or at a minimum that we encrypt it to almost sound like static (military is/has moving to this).

just my 2 cents,
epic

Bruce Perens, of "open source" fame, and nocode

[IvyMike]

A bit of trivia: Bruce Perens [perens.com] of Open Source fame founded No-Code International [nocode.org], "a norganization dedicated to the abolition of the Morse code testing requirement as a prerequisite for any class of Amateur Radio license." I didn't see NCI mentioned anywhere in the article, but they're pretty much responsible for the last overhaul of Morse requirements.

A good article summarizing his No-Code work is Bruce's own article,"No-Code: The End-Game" [perens.com].

reliability

[Clueless Moron]

CW gets through better than SSB, but not by much. You can do almost as well with SSB simply by speaking slowly and repeating each word three times. Your throughput will still be better than a typical CW QSO.

Now, PSK31, is fantastic. I have reliably worked stations that I can barely hear on the radio using PSK31. Using 5W output.

Re:Technician class?

[Simonetta]

It's pretty lame, in my opinion. Like making drivers pass a test using stick-shift before letting them drive on the interstate highways, regardless of whether their car is manual or automatic transmission. It's a silly hold-over from the olden days. The world is no longer so disconnected that one would really ever NEED to send a carrier-wave message.

I agree. The Morse code requirement should have been dropped thirty years ago.
Morse is interesting as an absolute minimal communications protocol...bicycle generators powered radio transmitters sending out pleas to the world from the distant third-world village located near the epicenter of the big earthquake that just hit...and POWs tapping out messages to each other on the water pipes with their West Point rings...that kind of thing.
Even carrier wave radio has a place for Morse. But in these days of 10 MIPs per dollar microcontrollers that can convert Morse and any other code to ASCII characters (and then translate its language), it's hard to justify requiring Morse proficency in order to get a radio licence. Seems like just a means of radio geeks keeping the riff-raff away from their little hobby.

Re:Why Morse?

[Our Man In Redmond]

While I agree with you that dropping the Morse requirement by itself won't signal the end of using Morse on the bands, it will signal the beginning of the end. Without the license requirement, what incentive is there to learn and use Morse? It will just become another "legacy" mode, a reminder of the good old days of hamming, sort of like AM.

And, as those who have used and loved it move on to other pursuits, pass away or whatever, the number of CW operators is going to drop until there will be no further justification for keeping the large portions of the bands that are currently reserved for CW. Maybe they will be transitioned to "digital media" segments to include PSK-31 and other digital modes, but more likely there will be small (~50 kHz) windows for "digital" modes and the rest of the bands will be given over to voice.

I think it's inevitable, just like the changes when spark gave way to CW or AM to SSB. And in a way it's too bad, because when you get right down to it, voice is great and digital modes are great (use 'em myself when I get the chance), but the big advantage of Morse code is its minimalism. You only need an oscillator and an antenna to get a signal on the air, and your ears and a receiver to decode it on the other end. There's something cool about knowing that when the meteor hits [slashdot.org], you could head up into the hills in Oregon with one of Wes Hayward's CW transceivers the size of a roll of quarters, an antenna and a pack of batteries, and be on the air looking for other survivors in a matter of hours.

Why Morse Code is important!

[ctwxman]

The year was 1968. It was a warm, summer night and I was walking down MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village with my cousin Michael and our friend Larry. The Village was electric back then with poster stores, head shops, music stores and other places for teenage boys to get lost and kill time. Many had their doors open to the summer breeze and heavy foot traffic. As we walked past one record store, I sensed something unusual about the music I heard.

"Oh dear Miss Morse,
I love you.
Yes I do,
really do."

And then, the refrain, sung the way you'd expect a secret, hidden musical message to be sung.

"dit dit daaaah dit.
dit dit dah.
dah dit dah dit
dah dit daaaaah"

Oh my God! Someone had said the word... that four letter word guaranteed to get you suspended in school and punished at home.
Holy sh... well, you couldn't say that back then either. The song was (Oh Dear) Miss Morse by Pearls Before Swine. It was the kind of thing you could hear on MacDougal Street... not on the radio. Ham radio had never before, and would never again, let me be so cool.

Never mind the aliens...

[M1FCJ]

Well, morse code exam was a tool for having enough people to be able to communicate after the big nice exchange with the ruskies. Before that it was the easiest way of having experienced radio operators when the enemy tanks started rolling around (into Poland, mostly).

Now there are no Ruskies, no german tanks rolling around, no ships to save since no longer international rescue stations uses morse (everyone has a satellite phone apparently).

IMHO, it will live, as a hobbyist's tool. Once I turn the DSP on and reduce the filter frequency to 25kHz I can hear any weak signal through the interference. I have a Yaesu FT-847 and you can put nice mechanical filters in it and have even tighter filters. Since default morse code signal fits into a 3 kHz deviation it is an efficient way of communication.

It is just like steam locomotives. The diesels have taken them out of the lines but they still run.

Da da di di dit, di di dit da dat. M1FCJ/P signing off.

Re:probably too late to save the hobby

[M1FCJ]

I can't agree more. There are too many old farts in uk.radio.amateur newsgroup. [google.com]

On the other hand after getting my UK license I met a number of gentleman which are really heroes in my eyes. G4LHI from Huntingdon is running morse lessons in 144.7625 every monday and tuesday evenings and he is a FISTS [fists.org] member. He is a very nice guy and always answers a CQ on VHF when he is around.

Because of the M3 licenses th e old farts are on the attack again. The basic response is not to let yourself down. Ignoring them is the best way of dealing with them.

Amateur radio is fun, no one should let these people ruin it.

Its about time

[thogard]

At one time I was the thrid or 4th youngest person to ever pass the written test but I can't copy morse at a rate fast enough for the adanced licenses. The result of the stupid requirement is that I never did much with radio and I didn't do any research at all even though I grew up in a house where I had all the tools including good scopes and spectrum analizers and I had access to the best test gear that exists. However the "old boys club" rules about morse keep me from using any of the frequency that was allocated for research. Once the no-code frequencies came it, it just was a 2 meter CB system and you couldn't do any cool stuff like APRS until it had become mainstream. Now if the numebrs of members don't increase quickly soon, all the frequency will get allocated to other things. That will be bad for research but how many hams do that? The EE's I knew that were all the Extras are no longer with us and I don't know too many General class people who could still pass the CW test.