[David G4EBT]

Going right back as far as I can recall (back to the mid 1950s as an SWL in my early teens) through to when I became licensed aged 35 in 1974 to the present day, there's been a widespread misunderstanding by radio amateurs of the regulatory principles which govern any restrictions placed on any activity by any public body from Ofcom to HMRC, to the Government or local By-laws. A cornerstone of all regulations is the 'principle of proportionality' - any restrictions imposed on any activity must be both proportionate and necessary, to prevent whatever problems they seek to minimise or obviate. They can go no further.

If you want to go fishing, you get a licence over the counter. If you want to drive a car, you take a theory and practical test, to demonstrate you have reached the minimum standard to be able to drive unsupervised so as not be a danger to yourself and other road users. If you want a pilots' licence, the risks and consequences are far greater, so the training and tests are much harder, for obvious reasons. If anyone wants to operate amateur radio equipment, they need to meet the minimum standards to ensure that they understand the limitations of frequency bands, power levels and modes on which they are permitted to operate. That's to ensure that amateurs don’t cause interference to other spectrum users, notably the emergency services or air traffic control.

None of these licences have to be 'earned' - they are not a 'reward for effort' and they're not 'a privilege' - they’re a legitimate entitlement if we attain the minimum standards necessary to satisfy the terms of the licence. If we breach the terms, (whether a driver, a publican, a pilot or a radio amateur) we risk losing that licence. There has been (still is it seems to me), a peculiar mindset in amateur radio that we should have to ‘work hard’ to ‘earn’ a licence – not to expect to ‘get it on a plate’, or get it ‘out of a cornflake packet’ (terms often used over the years to denigrate first the now defunct Novice Licence, then the Foundation licence.

I delayed taking the RAE Course until 1973 in my mid-thirties as radio amateurs seemed to be old fogeys with whom I felt I had little in common with. I did the RAE course as my primary interest was in construction rather than operating and thought it might help. At the time, I was in mid-career with two young sons aged nine and five. We’d moved house from Nottingham to Spalding to Grimsby in nine months and I was in the final year of a professional qualification (which is now a post-graduate course) covering 11 subject including accounting, commercial law, economics and statistics. That involved two nights a week at night school, (six hours), home study and copious homework. Three three-hour exams to pass, plus a case-study to be submitted and evaluated.

In the same year joined the local amateur radio club and learnt that there was a night school RAE course so I decided to squeeze that in too. So: in mid career, newly promoted, a recent house move, a father and a husband, the least significant thing I did that year was to study for and pass the RAE. I passed the professional exams too, leading in time to Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. I mention this not to be boastful, but as an indication that when it comes to having a ’work ethic’ I was hardly a slouch.

I applied for an amateur Radio B licence and was allocated G8JIN.

When I went to the club to say I’d passed the RAE and was now licenced, my efforts were scornfully dismissed and I was roundly told by the self-styled ‘Klarsays’ that as a ‘Jait’ (G8), I was only half an amateur without the Morse test, and to do that I’d "need to put some effort in". (There never were ‘Class A’ and ‘Class B’ licences. I still have the BR68 documents – one is headed 'Amateur Radio Licence Full (A)', the other 'Amateur Radio Licence Full (B)'. ‘Class’ is something the amateur fraternity invented).

Whatever. I bit my tongue and a more affable Club member quietly suggested I approach an elderly amateur who wasn’t a Club member but had taught him Morse. I duly contacted him, and he said: "If you come two nights a week for an hour after work, I’ll get you through your test in three months, but if you miss a night, don’t bother coming back. All I ask in return, is that you take me along to the Coastguard Station for an outing when you take your test". (He was a fluent Spanish speaker, so all the plain language he sent was in Spanish!).

True enough, three months later, he got his outing, and I became G4EBT.

The ‘Klarsay’ old guard had an 80 Metre net every Monday night, so I chipped in and gave my new callsign. They welcomed me, said my callsign wasn’t familiar, asked where I was from, and I when I told them I was local and said “I was G8JIN last week, I’m G4EBT this week. Same guy, just a B licensee with Morse’. No big deal – a little thing in a busy year. It didn't go down well - they said "the Morse test acts as a filter, to weed out the feckless and stop them swamping the HF bands".

When it came to ‘standard of operating’, these same guys didn't see the irony of using CW abbreviations in speech. They thought it was perfectly normal behaviour to say things like “QRX one while I QSY to answer a call on the twisted pair/visit the little boy’s room”. “WX isn’t up to much today”. “QTH is Grimsby’, “73 - see you further down the log/electricity bill". It seemed to me to be bizarre to talk in that way and assert that it’s ‘correct procedure’ rather than 'jargon'.

Neither did they understand that in a QSO, once contact has been established it was only necessary to announce your callsign every 15 minutes not at the end of every over. (They could discuss for an hour about how low standards had fallen when so many amateurs said ‘seventy threes’ - not seventy three’. (What's wrong with 'thanks for the chat - cheerio'. And despite several being ex Royal signals, in a net, they were never all on quite the same frequency. As is largely the case today, they all used shop-bought 'plug 'n play' equipment.

Fast forward to when the Foundation licence came in:

I was then Secretary of the (now defunct) Local amateur radio Club and some members were in Raynet. There was an annual 20-mile walk by a rambling Club of a large firm in Hull, which Raynet liked to be involved in. (All a bit pointless really, when mobile phones would have done just as well). They wanted someone who could be a ‘back marker’ on the walk to make sure any stragglers didn’t get lost. My wife and I offered to do that.

At five-mile intervals, there were amateurs who recorded the names of the walkers who had passed that point and relayed the info to the Net Controller. One amateur staffing one of those posts was a newly qualified Foundation Licence amateur. Every time he went in air, someone jammed him by playing music over him. The suspect was a local G3 who had been implacably opposed to the new licence structure which he said had 'dumbed down the hobby and sounded its death knell'. That’s what in the minds of too many, passes for ‘The Ham Spirit’.

There is a strange mindset that if the requirements of the licence are tweaked this way or that, the hobby will blossom (or wither on the vine). It won't.

At least the present structure introduced some elements of practical work, and hats off to all the Clubs and Amateurs who have worked tirelessly to offer tuition, encouragement and support to newcomers. It's just the sort of structure that would have prepared me much better than ever the RAE did. Anyone who was reasonably literate and numerate could have answered five questions from a choice of eight with time to spare. EG: 'Sketch and describe the operation of a simple superhet receiver'.

My main hobby (apart from vintage radio restoration) is woodturning. I’ve been secretary of the local Club for fifteen years. It had grown from 40 members in 2015 to 65 by 2019, and since lockdown I’ve received emails and phone calls from people who want to take up the hobby and join the Club when lockdown is lifted. I’m having to disappoint them as the venue we use isn’t large enough to accept any more. It's ironic that you don’t need any qualifications, yet the standards attained have never been higher. As a competition judge, I often feel embarrassed at judging the work of people who – three years earlier, didn’t own a lathe, yet attain standards beyond my own level.

Sorry to bang on about it at such length when to all intents and purposes I'm out of the hobby.

Where I think the hobby lost its way, is that the RSGB was only ever focused on the RAE, rather than ‘lifelong learning’ and for example, running courses on the practical, experimental, construction aspects of the hobby as continual development. RSGB did their best, publishing a wide range of books, but ironically, it then gets labelled not as a service-provider, but as a profit-orientated bookseller.

Nothing will change.