KICKER: NOT-SO-POETIC LICENSE
ANCHOR/PAUL: We end this newscast with a story about how the FCC is
bringing Novice call signs back. Well.......yes and no. Amateur Radio Newsline's
Don Wilbanks, AE5DW, tells us what's really going on.
DON: When is a Novice call sign not a Novice call sign? The answer is
simple: When it's not! There are no more Novice licenses being granted,
but don't think for a moment that this doesn't mean the old call signs
have gone away -- because they haven't. In fact, they're starting to
turn up again. Just ask Brandi Frame, KN4AFW, who was among those to get
one of them last month. According to callsign historian Pete Varounis
NL7XM, this freshly minted Technician doesn't exactly have a freshly
minted callsign: it was first assigned 62 years ago to a 15-year-old boy
named Chase P. Hearn in Raleigh, North Carolina.
So what's going on here? The FCC hasn't gone retro or nostalgic, it's
just issuing callsigns sequentially, as it always has. District 4, where
Brandi lives, simply exhausted its supply of "KMs" and by the time she
and the others took their test, the FCC had moved on to the sequence of
"KN" callsigns. Sure, this has caused some oldtimers to do a doubletake
-- one of them was Brandi's husband, Andrew Frame, WD4RCC, who remembers
the old Novice Class -- but as Pete points out, "KN" assignments are
going to become increasingly commonplace as other districts exhaust their
"KM" licenses too.
By the way said Pete, the original Novice license-holder, Chase, is still
on the air - operating now from Virginia - and his callsign of K4AFW is
simply an upgrade of the 1954 callsign now assigned to Brandi. Everything
old is new again!
For Amateur Radio Newsline, I'm Don Wilbanks, AE5DW.
**
NEWSCAST CLOSE: With thanks to Alan Labs; the ARRL; CQ Magazine; Darwin
Amateur Radio Club; Hap Holly and the Rain Report; The New York Times;
National Archives of Australia; Ohio-Penn DX Bulletin; QRZ.COM; Southgate
Amateur Radio News; Ted Randall's QSO Radio Show; World Radio Day; WTWW
Shortwave; the Yale Radio Club; and you our listeners, that's all from the
Amateur Radio Newsline. Please send emails to our address at
newsline@arnewsline.org. More information is available at Amateur Radio
Newsline's only official website located at www.arnewsline.org.
For now, with Caryn Eve Murray, KD2GUT, at the news desk in New York, and
our news team worldwide, I'm Paul Braun, WD9GCO, in Valparaiso, Indiana
saying 73, and as always, we thank you for listening.
Amateur Radio Newsline(tm) is Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.
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