Amateur Radio Foundation Licence: Some Thoughts.

Being a girl, my daughter likes talking.  She was lucky enough to have a brief chat with a girlie expedition to Greenland a few weeks ago, and as a result, it spiked her interest in radio. She's only seven years old.

I decided to sign my daughter up to the Foundation Licence course, which in our case, was a very comfortable affair, held each week at kindly MW0SEC's QTH.

It's a long time since I studied for my full licence, so it was interesting to see how the 'new' system of split licence levels works.

In general, the syllabus is pretty easy, and my daughter, with a bit of help from dad, managed to grasp, at least in some sense, what are often very esoteric facts about electronics and radio. True understanding of many things in the syllabus escapes even very old timers, as any read of forum posts on the internet often reveals!

But there are a few major let-downs if, as we might desperately hope is the case, the licensing body and the RSGB want to attract younger members.

One of these is the very heavy-going part on licensing conditions.   Whilst it's allowed to look at the licence conditions for the exam, the wording is so legalesque that it really does make it quite difficult for adults who are not used to looking at formal documents, let alone children.

Whilst it's difficult to say the syllabus is in any particular sense wrong, it could be very much more user-friendly.  The whole thing does still, I regret to say, have a certain aftertaste of years gone by, when non-Morse licensees (called, in that very British way 'Class B' holders) were sneered at as second-class undesirables.

The place where useful change could take place is in the exam.  Here, I think it would be very useful for children sitting the exam to be helped with interpretation of some of the questions (and not answering them) and the whole mechanism of sitting a formal test, which is quite novel - and very daunting - to someone of that age. If those responsible for setting up the system think back long and hard enough, they might recall just how terrifying an exam can be to youngsters.

A review and change is needed, with an emphasis on making the whole thing a further level less stuffy.  I hope that it comes a little bit faster than the glacial pace, far outstripped by the rate of fall in members, at which the RSGB and Ofcom seem to think is appropriate.  As my flying instructor used to say: "if something's not going right, do something about it straight away!"  Quite so...