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- QST, February 1989, page 9 =
- The Rewrite =
- As communications technology has grown ever more complicated, the FCC Rules
- governing Amateur Radio have grown accordingly. Trying to figure out the
- present Part 97 is not a trivial pursuit. With the help of the ARRL
- publication, The FCC Rule Book, it is possible to ferret out the answers to
- most questions about amateur operating = possible, but not always easy.
- In 1980, the FCC tried to improve the situation with a Plain Language rewrite
- of the amateur rules. In this proposal, the traditional approach to writing
- regulations was abandoned in favor of a question and answer format. Now, Q
- and A isnt a bad way to explain something, we use it to good advantage in The
- FCC Rule Book, itself an outgrowth of the Plain Language discussion. But
- after careful review, it turned out not to be a good way to define whats
- legal and what isnt in a concise, specific fashion. There were other flaws
- in the Plain Language effort, perhaps the most serious being the proposed
- elimination of Section 97.1, the Basis and Purpose statement which sets out
- why the government thinks Amateur Radio is a good thing. The more that
- people looked at Plain Language, the less they liked it, so, about a year
- after it had been proposed, there was great relief when the FCC dropped the
- idea. +
-