Should a licensed General be asking this question?

[k4kyv]

With all due respect, should a General Class licensee, with a "W" prefix 1 X 3 callsign, be asking this question?

I opened my Kenwood TS-120 for the first time since buying it on eBay 2 weeks ago and found that it has a SSB filter installed. It's a YK-88S 2.4 kHz.
I don't know much about filters, so could someone explain what this filter does?

And licensed amateurs are expected to know what p.e.p. is and how to measure theirs?

[W0GSQ]

Guess all those memory tricks to get your ticket really work!

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

It all because he doesn't know the Morris Code!

[AF9J]

<Sigh!>  Cmon!  I took my General in the mid 80s, and you had to know about filters then.  I would certainly think they should know that now.  I mean - it's a no-brainer type of thing.  Gee, I hope he has no problems reading out his freq. considering that the TS-120 has an analog dial!  As for the 1x3 callsign - that doesn't mean much nowadays.  There are so many newbs and relative newbs getting vanity calls nowadays - a 1x3 doesn't mean much anymore for OTness.

73,
Ellen - AF9J

[W1IA]

It's probably someone licensed for 30 years !!

Hope the Kenwoody has a digital display !

Sort of like those 25-30Yr. EXTRAS that tune right up on a ongoing OSO, like last night on 75 !!  Ask Brentina !!  Best to just chuckle and STRAP !

The FOF
WB2FOF

3 days without cigabutts FOF...my sense of humor has been a tad thin. SO GET THE HELL OFF MY FREQUENCY! ARE YOU ON NARCOTICS?

Brent(TINA) W1IA

[Tom WA3KLR]

A.  It is the component that ensures the design meets a 2400 Hertz Necessary Bandwidth.

(From the ARRL 2012 Q & A Manual.)

[ve6pg]

...i herd a guy today, (one of our new credit card hams), state ..."T-9...WHAT DOES THAT MEAN...NEVER HERD OF IT..."
   this clown got his ticket about a year ago, and further to that, never herd of  RST.....sk...

[W1RKW]

Scary is all I can say. 

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

It's hardly new. I've heard idiots on the air over 10 years ago uttering, "Them boys is runnin' AM and sideband at the same time!" in reference to an AM signal. Another good one from that era was, "They put that squeal on their signal just to annoy us!" not understanding the concept of their product detector creating a heterodyne beat note with the AM carrier.

Even further in the past I've heard classics (still hear them today), like:

"Let me tune my SWRs."
"This antenna works great for DX and local contacts."
"This radio has more talk power since I removed the ALC."
"There's a 6 kHz bandwidth limit for AM."
"You are splattering the entire band!"
"I don't know why everyone is having trouble hearing me. I hear everyone just fine with my 15 foot high dipole."

[N3DRB The Derb]

the 2.4 KC filter is teh filter that makes AM sound Hyellowy.

I dont have the amp going, but I'n warmin up the yeasu. no one is less han 40 over.

[W9ZSL]

Yikes. How did this dude get his license? I for one am definate "old school" and when I get my ticket back sure as hell I'll apply for a vanity call considering my old one was given to someone down in southern Wisconsin. Unfortunately you can't tell if an OT really is. To get you up to speed I'm working with Ed K9FWR who is building a killer AM rig using a 4-250A and some 811As for mods. Me too. I scored a cherry DX-60B to go with my HW-10 RCVR and Kenwood 440 so I'm well on my way to some extra fun come retirement next year.  Mike (ex) K9ZSL.

[ka3zlr]

Good Evening All,

 The Thing is, this is actually to be Expected. I don't have a problem when a prospect asks a question, it's when they don't and get into some type of mess, for a better word i guess.

 One of the greatest aspects of this forum is that very situation..why i always consider my roots from here..but Hey standardize the tests standardize the outcome...it wasn't my ideal.

[W1UJR]

With all due respect, should a General Class licensee, with a "W" prefix 1 X 3 callsign, be asking this question?

I opened my Kenwood TS-120 for the first time since buying it on eBay 2 weeks ago and found that it has a SSB filter installed. It's a YK-88S 2.4 kHz.
I don't know much about filters, so could someone explain what this filter does?

More humorous than the question may be the answers! 

At least the guy is asking, that's a good sign that he wants to learn.
In the long run, those who pass the exam by memory, and not by learning theory, are just cheating themselves...and at the same time providing us with some humorous nuggets of mirth!

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Yup. Got some AMers like that. One tried to tell me he could hear audio out to 9 kHz because his receiver had a 9 kHz IF bandwidth.

[Bill, KD0HG]

Yikes. How did this dude get his license?

Proof, once again, that an infinite number of monkeys sitting in front of an infinite number of typewriters are certain to churn out Shakespeare play every now and then.

Or as they say in the hinterlands:
"Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then."

[W1UJR]

.

Or as they say in the hinterlands:
"Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then."

Or my favorite, "Somebody has to push the wheelbarrow."

[N3DRB The Derb]

by the time dinner was over, the band had crapped out. tuned around for half a hour, about 4 slopbuckets on the whole band. Gonna check again....no one on. decided to make some use of the time and set up my second bench/operation position. So now I have 2 benches like what you guys saw again. Will hold a lot of mauls and munkys. lotsa space now.

now I gotta get Glo set up for her beadmaking stuff, since she was using that bench  Tomorrow will be all about her stuff. Yaesu is hooked up ok, tuned ready to go - will check band around 4 to 5 tomorrow. JTD was 60 over.

[k4kyv]

It's probably someone licensed for 30 years !!

I just found this on his QRZ.com profile:

I became interested in amateur radio when I was about 10 years old when my mom's uncle passed away and I got his shortwave set. I would spend hours at night during the summer listening to RTTY, CW, the UTC clock, and distant broadcasts, trying to figure out what it all meant.

In high school I was obsessed with CB radio until a friend of mine showed me a book called "Now You're Talking". Senior year of high school, we were all told that a "Senior Project" would need to be done in order to graduate. The project had to involve something you could possibly use as a career in the future. So I chose Ham Radio. I was granted my technician ticket as KC7WNY on 05/19/1997.

I always thought calls with a W7 prefix were really cool, so I applied for a vanity with the suffix of my initials in March of 2005. I upgraded to General class on April 10th, 2007 at the Radio Club of Tacoma (which I just recently became a member of) and have been working in my spare time on my Extra...

My other hobbies are beekeeping, bluegrass banjo, and gold prospecting.

Looks like he may be on the right track, even if he did use "memory tricks" to pass his test.  Maybe someone who lives near his QTH should invite him over and introduce him to AM.  He might be a  good prospect.

[kb3nqd]

I won't comment about his technical skills but I will say this.  At least he is willing to ask a question if he doesn't know the answer.  There are an awful lot of times when I hear folks getting in conversations with someone else about something they know nothing about.  Instead of admitting ignorance and using it as an opportunity to learn too often people are afraid to speak up and say I don't understand this.  Hopefully someone will stop the conversation before Vectors, Wavelets, 3rd order intercepts, and Klystrons become the same thing.  It is possible that folks are worried about being made fun of or it is possible they truly believe they know more than everyone else out there (the fact is though that there is always someone out there that is smarter...)

Just my .02

"How can we learn when we are always using all of our knowledge".
Author unknown

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Yes, and he did actually open the cover on his rig. There is hope.

[AF9J]

I guess those are some good points guys.

Ellen - AF9J

[KA1ZGC]

Given the number of hams licensed way longer than me that don't understand concepts they had to show proficiency in to get their licenses, I'm not suprised.

Given that most licensed hams are more likely to ridicule the guy than give him the right answer, he probably won't learn any more than the rest, and we will claim that's his fault.

Raise your hands, everyone here who was born knowing what that filter does...

...I see.

You want to know why hams are getting dumber? Don't blame them for not knowing, blame us for pointing fingers and laughing at their questions instead of answering them.

Shame on us for letting it ever slip this far.

--Thom
Keep Away One Zorched Ground Conductor

[k4kyv]

No reason to deride the guy.  He did take the cover off his radio and ask a question about something he didn't understand.  If anything, he is a victim of the present-day  system of entry into amateur radio.  How many of us "experts" would have been equally baffled had we grown up in his era?

If you look at his profile in QRZ.com, he is no old buzzard at or nearing retirement age, but probably in the bottom 10th percentile (and probably at the low end of that segment) of age for licensed hams.  He expressed a fascination for radio dating from age 10, so the present AM scene might be just down his alley.

The point is, how could one achieve being licensed as a General and not know the purpose of the i.f. filter in a receiver or transceiver?  Yet, some still insist that with the volunteer exam system and published question-answer pools, the exams are just as rigorous as ever and have not been dumbed down.  IIRC, my General class exam required me to draw a block diagram of a basic bare-bones superheterodyne receiver.

And this has nothing to do with the "Morris" code.  Sure, this bloke is a no-code General, but so is everyone else who took the test since this past February.  Still, he mentions listening to CW at age 10, and includes a "Chinese military straight key" as part of his station equipment, so presumably he has at least made a stab at running cw.

[KA1ZGC]

The point is, how could one achieve being licensed as a General and not know the purpose of the i.f. filter in a receiver or transceiver?  Yet, some still insist that with the volunteer exam system and published question-answer pools, the exams are just as rigorous as ever and have not been dumbed down.  IIRC, my General class exam required me to draw a block diagram of a basic bare-bones superheterodyne receiver.

Radios contain all kinds of filtering. Power supply filters, IF-stage filters, RF-stage filters, AF-stage filters. He hasn't been into enough radios to make the educated guess as to which filter he's staring at yet.

The VE program has become a catch-all excuse to not teach these guys anything. I came in by way of the VE program, and I'm no idiot. I know my way around a rig because I found the answers to the questions I had. I read. I researched. I evolved. I didn't have to draw a schematic of a class C amplifier, or a block diagram of a receiver to get my license, but I certainly can if I have to. I know plenty of guys who had to take the "real" exams at the nearest FCC field office who still don't have a clue how to operate, let alone diagnose a failure.

What's really to blame for the lack of knowledge in the hobby is the lack of elmering. When's the last time anyone here took a newbie under his wing and showed him the ropes, or is that just something that only us guys that came in under the VE program still beleive in?

If we all sit around and refuse to mentor anyone on the grounds that they need to be mentored, then we have only ourselves to blame for the paucity of understanding of basic radio theory, and we have no business blaming the VE program for our lack of involvement. That's just a crutch, and a piss-poor one at that.

We're supposed to be teachers as well as students. We've lost touch with that, and the result is a whole lot of un-/mis-informed people who only have each other to learn the wrong answers from.

The newbies aren't killing the hobby, the oldbies are. The newbies are eager to learn, but trying to get the oldbies to teach is like pulling teeth. How much would any of us know if someone hadn't taken a minute to explain all these things to us? Who's going to pass on what we've learned when we're all dead?

Imagine how far you would have made it in the hobby if you asked your elmer a question, and the response was "Shouldn't you know that already? Why, back in my day...".

The answer: you'd be asking random passers-by what that 2.4kc filter in your rig was for.

Nobody was born with this knowledge. We all had to learn it from somewhere. There was a time in all our lives when none of us have known the answer to that question, thankfully there were others around who were willing to explain it to us.

Those days are over, and that's what's to blame for the "dumbing down" of the hobby. Not the VE program, not the code-free licenses, not QRZ, not eHam, but every single licensed ham who holds back on passing on what others once passed on to them.

I'll say it again: shame on us for ever letting it get this bad.

--Thom
Kilowatt Amplifier One Zero Grid Current

[Rick K5IAR]

Hmmm.... Thom, who exactly are you referring to?  I don't know of a single AM operator who hasn't, is or would help anyone who asked.  To be cognizant that some of today's newbies are not as well versed in radio technology as are the older generation ham is not slinging mud at anyone or anything.  It's simply concern.  I think the AM community does an excellent job of Elmering and always being available to those who have questions.

Rick/K5IAR