Morse Code operators running about 11 WPM handily whooped ass over the current SMS message sending record-holder on the Jay Leno show recently.
In fact, the behind the scenes story was that even coming out on stage that night the SMS'ers had their asses handed to them so soundly during the rehearsals prior to the show that there was zero question they'd lose, on air.
I don't have a link to the video, but 11 WPM is slow compared to what these two guys were capable of. They're both morse experts.
Leno's costume people put the Morse guys in old railroad telegrapher outfits with the long white sleeves, vests, and green visors -- added some class for those of us who have railroader telegrapher blood running in our veins from our ancestors.
It's not so much the government, but the general idiots at large that want nannying from the government that are driving this.
The same people that think Homeowners Associations are better than getting involved with your neighbors and neighborhood and going to City Council meetings where they used to make these cool things called City Ordinances that could be enforced outside of having to sign a contract that you'll live the way your neighbors want you to live.
As they say... Live Free or Die. Go live, and thumb your noses at those who would rather watch TV and have their asses glued to the couch where the media can rile them up about how dangerous your hobby is right up until the point they take it away.
(I'm a Ham and a Pilot both, and you're right... I'm damn tired of the modern "if I don't do it, it must not be worth doing" mentality everyone seems to have, where smaller hobbies have to die so that everyone can "feel safe" or whatever it is that people who don't live real lives with real interests outside of work and their houses do.)
What barrier? Morse isn't required for the first level license class? Did you miss that part?
Ham radio is USING the internet. You can take the non-Morse test and use a local simplex station or repeater to pass VoIP to the world... and we do, every day...
Your perception that Ham is dying because of Morse is quite misplaced. No Ham I know who's truly experimenting and doing interesting things cares about the Morse requirement debate at all. If they're looking to use HF, they just pass the test and move on... doing whatever it was they wanted to in the first place.
Only the Whiners in their Recliners (on both sides of the debate) even care much about it.
The biggest problem about Ham Radio is the wrong perceptions of what it's all about. I don't communicate over Ham radio because I just wanted to communicate. I have a telephone for that. I communicate over Ham radio because I like to experiment with electronics and RF. And I do.
Hams that buy a commercially-made radio and just talk on it are missing much of the point of being an Amateur operator. But that's okay -- it's just a hobby. We're glad to have them on board too.
Until "SOS" isn't ubiquitously known as a distress signal, and part of cultural folklore, Morse will still be used for some emergencies.
Even if the inital respondant only knows the SOS part... they'll go find someone who can copy the rest or just figure out where it's coming from and rescue the person.
The only communications generally working correctly in the downtown Manhattan area after 9/11 at first were ham repeaters on the Chrysler building, which were used for weeks after the event by the Red Cross, etc.
You may want only a cell phone. Others of us know that it's good to have a backup plan to the non-regulated telecommunications services.
There are also still places in less populated areas of the U.S. where cell phones simply do not work -- the Colorado mountains being a prime example. I can easily reach out and find an injured fellow hiker some help with my ham gear while three or four helpless looking weekend-warriors with brand new Eddie Bauer vests on stand around looking stupid trying to get their Motorola Razor phones to place a call.
A friend of mine radioed down from the saddle between Long's Peak (Colorado's most popular 14,000' peak to climb, always loaded with hikers in the good weather months) to Boulder, CO to another ham to have them call the ranger station to send up help for a 60-year-old hiker who'd been hit by a 10 lb. rolling boulder square in the chest. He tried his cell phone and another carrier's phones first, to no avail. (Sometimes you're barely in range of a tower in the backcountry, so it's worth a shot...)
The lady was alright and the ranger hiked up there in close to record time -- of course, he was in training to SET the record climb speed on Long's, so that made sense.;-)
Wow, what airplanes are you flying? I haven't seen a radio that Ident's a station ever! I'm probably out of touch, haven't flown in a few years. I got the impression that most GA flying was moving over to mostly GPS use, anyway, and most of the fleet at the local airport attests to this... old VFR rigs in the panel, nice shiny new GPS at the top of the stack.
One could argue though that you'd still get the best and the brightest, they'd just fly through the piddly assed requirements and get one with what they're interested in.
Motivated people get stuff done and only whine about how "hard" it is while they're not making progress toward their goal.
When the Internet's down, the hams know how to do digital still. It does come in handy once in a while.
If you want the bands to have more interesting/useful conversations, then have them. I think the people that whine about what they're "listening" to are simply silly. Get on the radio and talk about Linux. Get on the radio and talk about digital modes. Get on the radio and talk about the projects you're building. If you don't, you listen to the morons... just like any party or place where lots of people gather.
Hint: The harder the band is to work, the more intelligent the people that are there. You'll never hear a moron on 10 GHz SSB. Use this to your advantage. Find the local experimenters who do the really hard things, and you'll find a fun group of peers, just like in computers or any other technical hobby.
There hasn't been a major loss of spectrum since part of 220 MHz went away in the 80's to UPS, who ultimately never used it. There's more noise on some bands (900 MHz, 2.4 GHz) but the hams are still licensed and the noisemakers are Part 15 devices... they lose out if we want them to, or until the rules change. What makes you think you can't play on HF? If you want to, you pass the tests and then move on... doing what you want to. You're really saying that you don't WANT to play on HF bad enough to take a very simple test.
I've never met a racist in ham radio that I knew of, and I'm on the Board of a 500 member club. I'm sure they're out there in roughly the same population density as in society as a whole. You just hear them more on the air because you wouldn't go anywhere near that guy's neighborhood in person to have a conversation with him, but over HF you can hear his ramblings... one voice in a million. Who cares?
Every technical hobby is FULL of elitists. Slashdot in and of itself is DEFINED by it's very slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" as a group of elitist computer users proudly known as "Nerds". Ham radio is no different. Not all hams are elitists any more than all Slashdot readers think only Nerds should be on the planet...
Well... wait... maybe they do sometimes... but anyway...
The thing that saves Ham Radio is people that care about it, no more no less. Emergency communications is part of the charter, no doubt, but it's a hobby -- if people care about it and help it along, it does well. If people neglect it an whine that the "bands are being taken over by idiots" so to speak, while not transmitting themselves and finding the non-idiots... it'll die.
Get on the air. I'll talk to you, and we can have a fun conversation ON THE AIR about what the knuckleheads who were on 15 minutes before have NO CLUE about.
Example: I listened for a while to a group of new hams discussing whether or not they should buy an Icom radio capable of 75W instead of a more normal 50W VHF mobile rig. Instead of just pissing and moaning that "these kids don't know anything" like most of my contemporaries, I joined the conversation and talked about the fact that dB is a logrythmic scale and that most of our repeaters around here are transmitting less than 50W, because they're on high mountains... and that if a modern receiver can't hear them, you're simply BLOCKED from its line of sight -- 75W just isn't going to help as much as a decent antenna when it comes to either receiver performance or the amount of RF you're getting to the repeater site.
These guys appreciated the information and it sparked further interest and conversations about the distance-squared rule, and antenna "gain". They want to learn, but there aren't any people willing to be Elmers anymore.
This being the same country that required special reviews of all VoIP connected transmitters (and perhaps still does?)?
Yeah... the RSGB's the epitomy of "progressive".
I agree with your sentiment that the U.S. is behind schedule for doing this, but please don't make it out like all the rest of the countries out there are fully-progressive about their Amateur rules and regulations across the board.
The UK had some of the most onerous VoIP rules imaginable, and it's still a pain to hook a simple PC VoIP link to a repeater over there, or even put up a repeater, isn't it? At least the last time I looked at your rules...
Canada probably has some of the most progressive and well-written Amateur rules out there...
You don't give enough specifics here to sound anything more than a spread-spectrum nut.
When you say "single chunk of spectrum", what band do you envision this on?
If HF, the natural limitations of the frequency mean that you need a HUMONGOUS "chunk of spectrum" for a high-speed transmission. Wider than most modern transmitters can do, reasonably.
If you are talking about VHF and up, you won't get any long distances out of it.
Basically you're blabbing on about the same old, same old that spread spectrum nuts in the 80's also expounded upon, and never delivered.
I agree with you that hams need to use more digital modes, but even the most advanced digital RF folks (cellular and trunking radio people) haven't figured out how to beat physics.
Lower freqencies propagate farther via ionospheric bounce. Higher frequencies are above the MUF and don't. And the distance-squared rule still applies to all, and path losses in free air kick in and whack VHF and up too.
Not trying to discourage you but I saw your posting about a $600 cost to manufacture your dream device today -- so where is it?
Plenty of hams pay upwards of $1000 for run-of-the-mill HF SBB/CW radios. It's not like no one would buy them and start giving you feedback, if the things were actually useful or even interesting enough to have a novel application TODAY.
Please see my other post about your mistaken belief that you can't use whatever this mystery mode is that you claim to have.
Somehow I missed clicking on your link, but I assume it's a software-defined radio kit. Seen 'em... most have horrible sensitivity and can't meet basic 3rd order harmonic specs to keep from interfereing with things around them without add-on filters, yet. You end up eating massive amounts of DSP horsepower to chew through the garbage that the non-selective receiver hears, and putting out spurious and cruddy signals on the transmitter unless you add filtering or keep the power levels very low.
Keep working on it, if you come up with the world-slayer, I'll be ordering one, don't worry. Just trying to let others reading along here know that your post is the post of a zealot, and if there were immediate practical applications of much of what you're talking about -- there'd already be hundreds, if not thousands, of real experimenters there already using them.
Which specific emission type are you thinking you're not allowed to use?
There's specific rules about certain types, but I think you're wrong that you can't use others.
Give the emission type identifier of this mystery emission type you claim you can't transmit, please.
FCC 97.309 clearly states that digital modes not listed in that section of Part 97 may be used as long as there is no overriding agreement signed with a foreign country to not use it to talk to them, and the only requirement is that you log your digital contacts and make the protocol public. Very GPL'ish, almost.
In addition, no encryption or other means of obscuring the message may be used. As long as your protocol is published somewhere, and not employing encryption, you're fine.
CodeQuick when done as the author recommends works well. You learn the sound of the letters and directly associate that with language portions of your brain, and not the math portion by counting dits and dahs. Never ever learn Morse by counting dits and dahs, or you'll be stuck at low speeds forever.
The brain has to do a conversion from sound to math, then count, then convert that to a letter when you learn by counting.
To aquire high speeds, the code must be learned as a LANGUAGE -- you hear "hello" you know it's a common greeting in English. You hear dah-di-dah-dit, you know it's the letter C.
Actually if you'd read the NPRM, you'd see that they take a number of citizen's comments seriously.
FCC bashing is popular, but mostly the folks that write NPRM's and work on real FCC work just get the job done, and do appreciate all feedback.
The Commission itself may be a mess at times due to politics and various back-room directives by Presidential administrations -- but they're a small group of the overall FCC, and do the least amount of work.
With the new generation of PIC18's and dsPIC's running at much higher clock speeds than the venerable 16F84, it's probably feasible that a hobbyist could create a device that can copy (and not just generate) PSK31 signals in a single chip with some off-board "jellybean" devices.
Certainly a small Engineering design shop could do it with more DSP horsepower and knowledge that most have nowadays.
I know Morse and didn't know that my first Designated Examiner had a peeve like yours also.
He was ready to type up my failure slip for the Private checkride but decided to tell me why first... that I had tuned, but not identified a single NavAid.
When I explained that I knew Morse Code, he laughed a bit nervously and thought for a second and said, "Oh! I haven't seen that in 20 years of being a DE. Mind if I test you on that a little?"
I said okay, and he proceeded to sound out a few ID's from a chart as if they were coming from the radio... I told him which ones they were. (He even pulled out a sectional from hundreds of miles away. I couldn't tell him the names of those NavAids but I could give him the three letter identifiers as he sounded them out.)
Was kinda a fun way to put the icing on my Private checkride many many years ago... I passed with flying colors after that one. Fun times!
Not just supposed to have... required by law to have.
Numerous cases of pilots who strayed into airspace they weren't supposed to be in during the standard VFR goof-off flight, and later when contesting their suspension of their license they find out that not having the appropriate charts aboard made them in an even worse position before the Administrative Law Judge.
There's plenty of fun stuff to do on HF, and it's a completely different world than VHF and up.
I love all of it, I contest every year in the VHF+ contest(s) and also regularly check in to the 3905 Century Club Nets on HF. It's all fun, and the variety keeps you busy/interested.
Have you ever done an installation of XP on that same laptop WITHOUT the manufacturer's modified installation media? i.e., from regular XP disks?
If yes, did everything work? Were any devices not working properly?
This is one of the problems, sometimes. It's rare for an end-user to ever install a raw OS from bare drives. And then they compare that "good" experience with a pre-loaded pre-configured machine to loading Linux from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
Morse Code operators running about 11 WPM handily whooped ass over the current SMS message sending record-holder on the Jay Leno show recently.
In fact, the behind the scenes story was that even coming out on stage that night the SMS'ers had their asses handed to them so soundly during the rehearsals prior to the show that there was zero question they'd lose, on air.
I don't have a link to the video, but 11 WPM is slow compared to what these two guys were capable of. They're both morse experts.
Leno's costume people put the Morse guys in old railroad telegrapher outfits with the long white sleeves, vests, and green visors -- added some class for those of us who have railroader telegrapher blood running in our veins from our ancestors.
It was actually forced by International Treaty until some time ago. Most people don't bother to know, so now you do.
It's not so much the government, but the general idiots at large that want nannying from the government that are driving this.
The same people that think Homeowners Associations are better than getting involved with your neighbors and neighborhood and going to City Council meetings where they used to make these cool things called City Ordinances that could be enforced outside of having to sign a contract that you'll live the way your neighbors want you to live.
As they say... Live Free or Die. Go live, and thumb your noses at those who would rather watch TV and have their asses glued to the couch where the media can rile them up about how dangerous your hobby is right up until the point they take it away.
(I'm a Ham and a Pilot both, and you're right... I'm damn tired of the modern "if I don't do it, it must not be worth doing" mentality everyone seems to have, where smaller hobbies have to die so that everyone can "feel safe" or whatever it is that people who don't live real lives with real interests outside of work and their houses do.)
What barrier? Morse isn't required for the first level license class? Did you miss that part?
Ham radio is USING the internet. You can take the non-Morse test and use a local simplex station or repeater to pass VoIP to the world... and we do, every day...
Your perception that Ham is dying because of Morse is quite misplaced. No Ham I know who's truly experimenting and doing interesting things cares about the Morse requirement debate at all. If they're looking to use HF, they just pass the test and move on... doing whatever it was they wanted to in the first place.
Only the Whiners in their Recliners (on both sides of the debate) even care much about it.
The biggest problem about Ham Radio is the wrong perceptions of what it's all about. I don't communicate over Ham radio because I just wanted to communicate. I have a telephone for that. I communicate over Ham radio because I like to experiment with electronics and RF. And I do.
Hams that buy a commercially-made radio and just talk on it are missing much of the point of being an Amateur operator. But that's okay -- it's just a hobby. We're glad to have them on board too.
Until "SOS" isn't ubiquitously known as a distress signal, and part of cultural folklore, Morse will still be used for some emergencies.
;-)
Even if the inital respondant only knows the SOS part... they'll go find someone who can copy the rest or just figure out where it's coming from and rescue the person.
CQD on the other hand, is long dead.
The only communications generally working correctly in the downtown Manhattan area after 9/11 at first were ham repeaters on the Chrysler building, which were used for weeks after the event by the Red Cross, etc.
;-)
You may want only a cell phone. Others of us know that it's good to have a backup plan to the non-regulated telecommunications services.
There are also still places in less populated areas of the U.S. where cell phones simply do not work -- the Colorado mountains being a prime example. I can easily reach out and find an injured fellow hiker some help with my ham gear while three or four helpless looking weekend-warriors with brand new Eddie Bauer vests on stand around looking stupid trying to get their Motorola Razor phones to place a call.
A friend of mine radioed down from the saddle between Long's Peak (Colorado's most popular 14,000' peak to climb, always loaded with hikers in the good weather months) to Boulder, CO to another ham to have them call the ranger station to send up help for a 60-year-old hiker who'd been hit by a 10 lb. rolling boulder square in the chest. He tried his cell phone and another carrier's phones first, to no avail. (Sometimes you're barely in range of a tower in the backcountry, so it's worth a shot...)
The lady was alright and the ranger hiked up there in close to record time -- of course, he was in training to SET the record climb speed on Long's, so that made sense.
I love it when people who don't read the articles or know anything about the organization they're bashing get caught out, don't you? ;-)
Nicely done.
Morse *is* extra credit. It's not required for the Technician Class license. It's only required for higher license classes.
Wow, what airplanes are you flying? I haven't seen a radio that Ident's a station ever! I'm probably out of touch, haven't flown in a few years. I got the impression that most GA flying was moving over to mostly GPS use, anyway, and most of the fleet at the local airport attests to this... old VFR rigs in the panel, nice shiny new GPS at the top of the stack.
Funny analogy - nicely done.
One could argue though that you'd still get the best and the brightest, they'd just fly through the piddly assed requirements and get one with what they're interested in.
Motivated people get stuff done and only whine about how "hard" it is while they're not making progress toward their goal.
Unmotivated people whine constantly.
A few remarks about your points.
When the Internet's down, the hams know how to do digital still. It does come in handy once in a while.
If you want the bands to have more interesting/useful conversations, then have them. I think the people that whine about what they're "listening" to are simply silly. Get on the radio and talk about Linux. Get on the radio and talk about digital modes. Get on the radio and talk about the projects you're building. If you don't, you listen to the morons... just like any party or place where lots of people gather.
Hint: The harder the band is to work, the more intelligent the people that are there. You'll never hear a moron on 10 GHz SSB. Use this to your advantage. Find the local experimenters who do the really hard things, and you'll find a fun group of peers, just like in computers or any other technical hobby.
There hasn't been a major loss of spectrum since part of 220 MHz went away in the 80's to UPS, who ultimately never used it. There's more noise on some bands (900 MHz, 2.4 GHz) but the hams are still licensed and the noisemakers are Part 15 devices... they lose out if we want them to, or until the rules change. What makes you think you can't play on HF? If you want to, you pass the tests and then move on... doing what you want to. You're really saying that you don't WANT to play on HF bad enough to take a very simple test.
I've never met a racist in ham radio that I knew of, and I'm on the Board of a 500 member club. I'm sure they're out there in roughly the same population density as in society as a whole. You just hear them more on the air because you wouldn't go anywhere near that guy's neighborhood in person to have a conversation with him, but over HF you can hear his ramblings... one voice in a million. Who cares?
Every technical hobby is FULL of elitists. Slashdot in and of itself is DEFINED by it's very slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" as a group of elitist computer users proudly known as "Nerds". Ham radio is no different. Not all hams are elitists any more than all Slashdot readers think only Nerds should be on the planet...
Well... wait... maybe they do sometimes... but anyway...
The thing that saves Ham Radio is people that care about it, no more no less. Emergency communications is part of the charter, no doubt, but it's a hobby -- if people care about it and help it along, it does well. If people neglect it an whine that the "bands are being taken over by idiots" so to speak, while not transmitting themselves and finding the non-idiots... it'll die.
Get on the air. I'll talk to you, and we can have a fun conversation ON THE AIR about what the knuckleheads who were on 15 minutes before have NO CLUE about.
Example: I listened for a while to a group of new hams discussing whether or not they should buy an Icom radio capable of 75W instead of a more normal 50W VHF mobile rig. Instead of just pissing and moaning that "these kids don't know anything" like most of my contemporaries, I joined the conversation and talked about the fact that dB is a logrythmic scale and that most of our repeaters around here are transmitting less than 50W, because they're on high mountains... and that if a modern receiver can't hear them, you're simply BLOCKED from its line of sight -- 75W just isn't going to help as much as a decent antenna when it comes to either receiver performance or the amount of RF you're getting to the repeater site.
These guys appreciated the information and it sparked further interest and conversations about the distance-squared rule, and antenna "gain". They want to learn, but there aren't any people willing to be Elmers anymore.
This being the same country that required special reviews of all VoIP connected transmitters (and perhaps still does?)?
Yeah... the RSGB's the epitomy of "progressive".
I agree with your sentiment that the U.S. is behind schedule for doing this, but please don't make it out like all the rest of the countries out there are fully-progressive about their Amateur rules and regulations across the board.
The UK had some of the most onerous VoIP rules imaginable, and it's still a pain to hook a simple PC VoIP link to a repeater over there, or even put up a repeater, isn't it? At least the last time I looked at your rules...
Canada probably has some of the most progressive and well-written Amateur rules out there...
The ones that understand basic courtesy might be able to teach you something.
They've enjoyed their hobby for 60+ years, respect that and be a little nicer about how you talk about them.
They probably also had "manners" back in the day when CW was popular.
While I agree with some of your basic sentiments, you're so rude I wouldn't listen to you if I were them either.
Yawn.
You don't give enough specifics here to sound anything more than a spread-spectrum nut.
When you say "single chunk of spectrum", what band do you envision this on?
If HF, the natural limitations of the frequency mean that you need a HUMONGOUS "chunk of spectrum" for a high-speed transmission. Wider than most modern transmitters can do, reasonably.
If you are talking about VHF and up, you won't get any long distances out of it.
Basically you're blabbing on about the same old, same old that spread spectrum nuts in the 80's also expounded upon, and never delivered.
I agree with you that hams need to use more digital modes, but even the most advanced digital RF folks (cellular and trunking radio people) haven't figured out how to beat physics.
Lower freqencies propagate farther via ionospheric bounce. Higher frequencies are above the MUF and don't. And the distance-squared rule still applies to all, and path losses in free air kick in and whack VHF and up too.
Not trying to discourage you but I saw your posting about a $600 cost to manufacture your dream device today -- so where is it?
Plenty of hams pay upwards of $1000 for run-of-the-mill HF SBB/CW radios. It's not like no one would buy them and start giving you feedback, if the things were actually useful or even interesting enough to have a novel application TODAY.
Please see my other post about your mistaken belief that you can't use whatever this mystery mode is that you claim to have.
Somehow I missed clicking on your link, but I assume it's a software-defined radio kit. Seen 'em... most have horrible sensitivity and can't meet basic 3rd order harmonic specs to keep from interfereing with things around them without add-on filters, yet. You end up eating massive amounts of DSP horsepower to chew through the garbage that the non-selective receiver hears, and putting out spurious and cruddy signals on the transmitter unless you add filtering or keep the power levels very low.
Keep working on it, if you come up with the world-slayer, I'll be ordering one, don't worry. Just trying to let others reading along here know that your post is the post of a zealot, and if there were immediate practical applications of much of what you're talking about -- there'd already be hundreds, if not thousands, of real experimenters there already using them.
Which specific emission type are you thinking you're not allowed to use?
There's specific rules about certain types, but I think you're wrong that you can't use others.
Give the emission type identifier of this mystery emission type you claim you can't transmit, please.
FCC 97.309 clearly states that digital modes not listed in that section of Part 97 may be used as long as there is no overriding agreement signed with a foreign country to not use it to talk to them, and the only requirement is that you log your digital contacts and make the protocol public. Very GPL'ish, almost.
In addition, no encryption or other means of obscuring the message may be used. As long as your protocol is published somewhere, and not employing encryption, you're fine.
CodeQuick when done as the author recommends works well. You learn the sound of the letters and directly associate that with language portions of your brain, and not the math portion by counting dits and dahs. Never ever learn Morse by counting dits and dahs, or you'll be stuck at low speeds forever.
The brain has to do a conversion from sound to math, then count, then convert that to a letter when you learn by counting.
To aquire high speeds, the code must be learned as a LANGUAGE -- you hear "hello" you know it's a common greeting in English. You hear dah-di-dah-dit, you know it's the letter C.
Actually if you'd read the NPRM, you'd see that they take a number of citizen's comments seriously.
FCC bashing is popular, but mostly the folks that write NPRM's and work on real FCC work just get the job done, and do appreciate all feedback.
The Commission itself may be a mess at times due to politics and various back-room directives by Presidential administrations -- but they're a small group of the overall FCC, and do the least amount of work.
Not really. Plenty of PSK31 beacon projects in PIC 16F84's out there.
With the new generation of PIC18's and dsPIC's running at much higher clock speeds than the venerable 16F84, it's probably feasible that a hobbyist could create a device that can copy (and not just generate) PSK31 signals in a single chip with some off-board "jellybean" devices.
Certainly a small Engineering design shop could do it with more DSP horsepower and knowledge that most have nowadays.
I know Morse and didn't know that my first Designated Examiner had a peeve like yours also.
He was ready to type up my failure slip for the Private checkride but decided to tell me why first... that I had tuned, but not identified a single NavAid.
When I explained that I knew Morse Code, he laughed a bit nervously and thought for a second and said, "Oh! I haven't seen that in 20 years of being a DE. Mind if I test you on that a little?"
I said okay, and he proceeded to sound out a few ID's from a chart as if they were coming from the radio... I told him which ones they were. (He even pulled out a sectional from hundreds of miles away. I couldn't tell him the names of those NavAids but I could give him the three letter identifiers as he sounded them out.)
Was kinda a fun way to put the icing on my Private checkride many many years ago... I passed with flying colors after that one. Fun times!
Not just supposed to have... required by law to have.
Numerous cases of pilots who strayed into airspace they weren't supposed to be in during the standard VFR goof-off flight, and later when contesting their suspension of their license they find out that not having the appropriate charts aboard made them in an even worse position before the Administrative Law Judge.
You should go for the General for sure.
There's plenty of fun stuff to do on HF, and it's a completely different world than VHF and up.
I love all of it, I contest every year in the VHF+ contest(s) and also regularly check in to the 3905 Century Club Nets on HF. It's all fun, and the variety keeps you busy/interested.
Farnsworth method or not is up to the examiners, although most use it.
E=I/R (Ohm's law)
Double the voltage, half the current if resistance stays the same.
... and code slowly at the cost of profit.
:-)
Since you didn't finish your sentence.
(No, I don't believe it, I just laughed that you didn't finish that retarded generalization.
Just so we know and your comparison is fair:
Have you ever done an installation of XP on that same laptop WITHOUT the manufacturer's modified installation media? i.e., from regular XP disks?
If yes, did everything work? Were any devices not working properly?
This is one of the problems, sometimes. It's rare for an end-user to ever install a raw OS from bare drives. And then they compare that "good" experience with a pre-loaded pre-configured machine to loading Linux from scratch.
Just checking, perhaps you have.