Ticket Talk
This issue’s lead feature focuses on the creativity of a Volunteer Examiner (VE) team in Jacksonville, Florida, in administering FCC license exams while following COVID-19 social distancing guidelines. Last month, we wrote about the launch of fully-remote license exams. It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t all that long ago that volunteer examining itself was new and different. Actually, it is kind of long ago now … this year marks the 35th anniversary of the full implementation of the VE program.
So for this month’s edition of the CQ Classics series, we take you back to the beginning of the VE era with two columns from 1984. First up is the first “Ticket Talk” column in June by Dick Bash, KL7IHP (who some of you might remember as the person who first published actual FCC exam questions and was primarily responsible for today’s publicly-available question pools). We follow that with excerpts from the August “dateline … Washington, D.C.” column by Ted Cohen, N4XX, in which he reports on the first exams conducted by volunteers as well as the FCC’s plans to phase out testing at Commission offices by the end of the year.
It’s also worth noting that in the beginning, the FCC continued to prepare the exam questions. It was several years before that task was transferred to the Volunteer Examiner Coordinators (VECs). As you’ll see, it was far from certain back in 1984 whether volunteer examining would be successful or even
