The Foundation Exam

Dear Don,

I thought I’d respond to a comment in your Keylines in the October edition, in particular your comment about a pass mark of 19/26 at Foundation. It actually brings up some wider points that deserve an airing. I should also stress that they are my comments, not wearing any particular hat.

How fair and hard is an exam? At Foundation there are 112 syllabus points. That is more than previously because they have been split out into finer detail. We all have different strengths and weaknesses so logically we should ask a question on all of them to be scrupulously fair to everybody.

How hard it is depends on the pass mark and, crucially, the difficulty of each question. At Foundation the aim is a reasonable all-round ability. That means the individual questions are easier but more of them need to be answered correctly. At Full a degree of specialisation is reasonable. The questions are harder than they might otherwise be but the pass mark is lower. That mirrors, in a way, the style many of us will remember from our school exams, answer any five of the eight questions.

Finally, you suggested it was a number of elderly men who wrote the questions. Far be it for me to comment on others, but I did retire from my day job a few years ago. We would love to have questions from younger authors and from both genders. The Exam Group do write a fair number of the questions. My own view is we should be vetting more and writing less. Alan Betts G0HIQ Bromley

Dear Don,

I was interested to see the very good article Riding the radio waves: amateur broadcasting booms in lockdown in the ‘i’ newspaper on August 24th. It quoted the RSGB as helping 1,500 new starters in the past four months pass their Foundation exam. Others have, of course, been helped as well by individuals, ‘real’ local clubs and societies and ‘virtual’ clubs like Essex Ham who have been running courses online. Often someone needs to be encouraged to take the first tentative steps and in the article featured, a ten year old boy had been supported by his licensed dad.

During early lockdown I was speaking to a friend who was feeling very bored and had an interest in radio from involvement in CB. I gave him some relevant websites, told him about local clubs and sent him a copy of PW. We kept in touch and after working hard, he has just passed the Foundation exam at 73 years of age and will be taking out a PW subscription as a birthday present. I am also encouraging another friend of a similar age and interests in the same way to have a go as well.

Where we can, we should all encourage and support anyone in these difficult times who shows an interest whatever their age and help to give them a new pastime while also doing our bit to ensure the future of our hobby.

Jon Sones M0AAO

Ipswich

Dear Don,

I feel I must take issue with your piece concerning the Foundation Licence. While I congratulate your granddaughter for her achievement, which I’m sure brings you both closer and much shared enjoyment, I really do not think we need even more dumbing down of the entry criteria for a transmitting licence, just to enable young children to find it easier to obtain. I have no problem at all with children taking up this hobby, and I acknowledge enthusiastically its place as a learning aid for STEM subjects in education (I am a former teacher).

However, what happened to shortwave listening as the entry route to amateur radio? I realise I’m in the older age group now (63) but I started in the hobby at 14, with no electronics interest or mentoring, just a friend of my dad showing a few of us some of the kit and sitting in on some

QSOs. I then spent four years as a listener, avidly logging what I could pull out of the noise on first a Hallicrafters receiver and then a Trio JR500. I learnt about antennas under my own steam, and developed my operating ability through being a receiveonly station. I occasionally visited a local club with my dad, and a few of his colleagues who were licensed invited me to join them for operating sessions occasionally (we were a GCHQ family). Why aren’t newcomers encouraged to do that now? Why is it necessary to get a transmitting licence to do radio? It was concurrent with this that I started taking PW, to build myself ATUs, Preselectors, etc from articles in the magazine. Few ever worked correctly but it was great fun! You don’t need to transmit to do amateur radio!

As a general point, there seems to be a modern tendency to let things be easily obtained or achieved, such that the value of achievements is reduced to very little. If you can just buy kit and transmit, where is the sense of achievement? It’s easy come, easy go. If you don’t need to understand that the word ‘mandate’ refers to a legal requirement, then how does respect for that law become understood? Having to earn the right to transmit, and subsequently gain additional rights by the expense of effort, is something that should be learned as a child, never mind be understood as an adult.

It is the job of an editor to sometimes generate reaction with controversial statements, so be it. However, I should be terribly disappointed if this were to become a policy promoted by PW. Lindsay Pennell G8PMA Wellingborough, Northants ( Editor’s comment: My thanks to Alan, Jon and Lindsay. PW policy will always be to encourage folk into the hobby. But the world has certainly changed and, yes, amateur radio nicely supports STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. There is, of course, a good reason to catch children in their early teens, because later they become bogged down with GCSE work, start meeting the opposite

sex and so on. And the opportunity for self-training is there with the progression through Intermediate and Full. I would argue that Foundation should be exactly that – no more than a start in the hobby, a taster if you like. But many congratulations to the 73-year old joiner too – well done. And Alan, while my comment about the questions being written by a worthy committee of elderly men was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I do welcome your thought that it would be good to get some younger folk involved in the question setting.)