Getting your First Class ticket (was: Music Till Dawn on WEEI)

[Sid Schweiger]

>> Many jocks back then went to the school in Sarasota, FL that had the Miami FCC office on the payroll.<<

That's the conventional wisdom.  It's also most likely an urban legend.  It was never necessary to pay anyone off to pass the old First Class or Second Class Radiotelephone exams.  The FCC, very unwisely, used only a few fixed sets of questions on all their exams.  The license mills ran on the theory that when their students came out of the exams, they would go back to the license mill's HQ and write down every question they could remember.  The schools then taught their students to memorize the answers to the questions.  This practice was carried out, in the open, for many years, but the FCC never did anything about it, except for prohibiting exam takers from removing any papers from the exam room, until they decided in the mid-1980s to abandon licensing requirements for broadcast stations altogether.

And those of us who didn't attend a license mill will recall that the questions weren't that difficult anyhow, if you had a basic understanding of tube and transistor electronics, although when I took the test in the 1970s there were all of two questions on the Second Class exam element dealing with transistors, and one on the First Class element.


Sid Schweiger
IT Manager, Entercom New England
WAAF/WEEI/WEEI-FM/WKAF
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E: sid@wrko.com