On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 05:05:26PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote: I agree, although it's been a few years... Morse is great, you can use *much* simpler equipment and get a readable signal through worse conditions with less power. My main rig, last time I lived some place with a yard big enough for wire antennas, was a CW-only Heath HW16, it was great. So simple that even a doofus like me had some inkling of how it worked. This may sound elitist but I really liked the fact that ham licenses had the Morse code requirement, because it kept out the riff-raff. Forcing people to learn to translate a cipher in their heads real time required a certain amount of commitment, so by the time they got a license, they really valued it and acted a lot more mature as a result. Meanwhile you could get a CB license just by mailing $4 (or not even, once the FCC got busted for charging fees), but of course that turned into 40 channels of impenetrable noise. Hmm, what was the name of that guy who decided that having a ham license w/o bothering to learn anything first was some kind of god-given right, so he started using the freedom of information act to find out the answers to the FCC tests and published them in books? I hope something bad happened to him by now... John Wilson D Bit