A couple of things struck me from this thread of messages.  I
don't think that operating practices
have necessarily gone down hill but this isn't exactly ringing praise.
I can remember listening to the 75-meter band in the mid to late
sixties when there was still a lot of AM on and the sidebanders and
AM-ers fought and deliberately jammed one another on certain
frequencies.  There were the music-players, noise makers and
potty-mouths who questioned everyone else's heredity, racial makeup and
on and on.

        Sometimes, the FCC would nab someone when it got really bad
and the FCC did use to have more field offices open so there were more
official ears out there,but it was a jungle on certain 75-meter phone
frequencies after Sundown.

        In the day, those same folks moved up to 20 and terrorized the
daylight side of the Earth with the same Bevus and Butthead antics.

        One other comment I want to respond to is that the theory we
must know isn't getting easier.  It is certainly changing and probably
moving toward a difficulty level that will give all our minds a good
workout if we really want to understand how things work and how to
solve problems.

        So we may not have to learn Morse code for much longer.  How
many of us understand digital signal processing and how TCP/IP really
works?  How does Gaussian mean shift keying work?  How does bit
interleaving in wireless communication increase reliability of the
data stream?

        I don't begin to know the full answers to all those questions,
but that is the kind of stuff that may eventually end up on
examination pools because that is the state of the art.
Error correction schemes and compression is what it is all about these
days.  Gaussian mean shift keying is a scheme for using pseudo-random
numbers to encode data so that DC levels such as all ones or all zeros
never show up on the transmitted signal which keeps the power
distribution uniform across the pass-band.  That's all I know, but it
is a very common method for encoding and decoding signals sent through
the air.  We'll probably be using it before we realize it and there
might be questions about the principle of that and other radio data
transmission techniques.

        Amateur radio is still a lot about technology and the ability
to make stuff work in an emergency is the whole idea for the amateur
radio service.  I will now get off my soap box and I am not harshly
disagreeing with anybody.  I upgraded to Extra in 1988 when we still
had to do the twenty-word CW reception.  I barely passed both the code
and theory and actually had to make two runs at the theory because I
didn't have up-to-date study manuals the first time around.  Thanks to
Handihams, however, I did get current manuals and succeeded on the
second try.  I remember guarding that code completion certificate as
if it was a winning lottery ticket.

73

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group