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| Joined: | Tue Feb 6th, 2007 |
| Location: | Scranton, Pennsylvania USA |
| Posts: | 2408 |
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Hucky, there are a couple of reasons for the licensing requirement. Back in the beginning days of radio before the bands/frequencies were set up like they are now, pretty much anyone with a transmitter could fire it up and transmit whatever they wanted on whatever frequency they wanted. The govt set up licensing as a way to give amateurs a place that was all their own and ensure that if any rules were broken they knew where to find you ;)
The Radio Act of 1927 set up licensing of both commercial and amateur radio operation. Before that, broadcasting was pretty chaotic.
Also, like Scott said, the equipment is powerful enough to kill you. In the beginning, amateurs built all their gear from whatever parts they could find, thus licencing ensured that they knew electronic theory enough that they wouldn't die when they powered up their homemade rigs.
I just read an article somewhere about different things that are dying off. Along with landline telephones, amateur radio was one of them. Since the advent of long range communications via cell and the internet, people don't feel the need for either of them. One of the first communications received from New Orleans after the devastating hurricane was by amateur radio. Commercial interests would love to get their hands on the bands reserved for amateurs. If that happens, ham radio will truly disappear, and I believe that would be a tragedy. During natural disasters, cell towers go down, landline telephones can go down, the internet can go down, but an amateur with a little transceiver and a generator/battery system can still communicate to the world.
Every year the World Organization of Scouting (including the Boy Scouts of America) host the Jamboree On the Air, an event that encourages Scouts from around the world to communicate with each other via amateur radio. The Scouts have had to add the Jamboree on the Internet because of the declining popularity of ham radio. Hopefully some of the Scouts I have taken to see the equipment used by hams (and the boys used to talk to Scouts in Europe) have interested them enough to pursue the hobby, but, as a Radio Merit Badge counselor I haven't had any of the boys in our Troop interested....yet!
Hopefully more people that are radio listeners will become interested like Scott in taking it one step forward...
Cheers,
Griff