"Sad Hams"

Oh, I hate that term! But it's become prevalent among certain Hams who get annoyed and exasperated with certain older Hams. I guess it's better than the previously used term - "Old Fart".

It's the typical generational thing. The newer Hams don't understand the older Hams and the older Hams don't understand the newer Hams. It's like when you were a kid and you got tired of hearing from your parents or grandparents, "When I was your age, I had to walk to school 5 miles in the snow ..... up hill both ways!"

The fact is that if you were licensed before 1980, you had no resource but to study the license manuals that were available at the time. You read and learned the theory and the rules. There were no question and answer books where you could memorize the answers that were on the exams without really understanding the why and wherefore.

That all changed in 1979 / 1980 when Dick Bash came out with his "Final Exam" books. I never had one of those, but as I understand it, these books consisted the questions and answers from the actual license exams. The story goes that the author had people questioned who had just left from taking their FCC proctored tests as to what questions they saw on the exams they just took.

True or not? I don't know. But whether it was true or not, the appearance of the Bash books seemed to trigger or hasten the demise of FCC testing and promulgated the evolution of the VEC system. Maybe it was just the governmental budgetary constraints of the time, but whatever the real reason, the system changed.

The VECs published the questions and answers that would be on the exams in their license manuals. Sure, there were a bajillion questions from which only a relatively few would be picked, but it changed the game. Of course there were still potential Hams who studied the "old school" way (sorry, couldn't resist the pun), but now there were candidates with good enough memories who just memorized what they needed to know in order to pass the exams. It still holds true to this day. I'm a VE and I see both types of candidate preparation all the time. Oh the angst when a question pool is about to change!  As the VE Liaison who arranges our VE Exam sessions, I can't tell you how many times that I hear "Do you have room for me on your session on the XXth? I want to take my exam before the question pool changes!" And in my head I'm thinking ......"The questions aren't changing that much. If you know THE MATERIAL, you'll be fine." But I hold my tongue, as I don't want to ruffle any feathers.

The problem is that. as a result, you have a lot of new Hams out there who really don't know what they're doing. And this may get me in hot water, but we haven't helped the situation by conducting "Ham Crams". Those are another thing that I just abhor. Trying to cram about 8 weeks worth of non-stressful conventional learning into one or two days is just chasing rainbows as far as I'm concerned. I'd love to find some way to find license retention figures of Amateur Radio ops who went that route. I'm willing to lay down money that there is a large percentage of these Hams who are most likely not to renew, or have not renewed their licenses.

As a result, and I have experienced this personally, you have some Extra Class Hams who don't have the foggiest notion as to how to build a dipole or program an HT. To make matters worse, they either don't know where to go to look up the information they need, or sometimes they seem to even lack the desire to do so They just depend on people who know what they're doing to spoon feed the information to them. They absolutely detest when they are told to open a book or "RTFM". I'm not going to spell it out, you know what that means.

And that frustrates the older Hams who either studied the traditional way, or those who have gone the newer route, but graduated from the "School of Hard Knocks" by taking the time to do a little research on their own before asking for help. So when someone asks a basic, simple question that every Ham worth his/her salt should know the answer to, and they get told where to go to get the answer (without actually being given the answer they are looking for) they are label that person as a "Sad Ham".

Sadly, this is the way things are. To somehow mitigate it, older Hams need to be more inclined to do a little more friendly and non-confrontational and patient Elmering. In turn,  newer Hams need to be more willing to show some respect to the veterans who have been in the trenches for a longer period of time, and not chafe when they aren't treated with the kid gloves they seem to expect and demand. If we don't learn to live with each other, it's going to be a lose-lose situation.

Enough of my kvetching - let's end this post on a high note with a really cool photograph. Brian Foltz WQ0A posted this to Facebook after completing his first CW QSO! Congratulations, Brian and thanks for posting the awesome photo!

Who doesn't love a nice set of paddles? And the lighting and composition are superb!

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!