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

[Kevin Vahey]

I had one friend go to Sarasota and he told me it was pretty much 3
 weeks on the beach. He was given the answer key the day they all went
 to Miami by bus. I believe the school was know as REI. There was
 another in Pasadena and one in Chicago as well.

 I went the other route using a correspondence school in Cleveland.
 They actually went over my work and it wasn't a scam. What I had
 problems with a couple of whiz kids at the then WTBS made things easy.

 My having the first phone got me in the door. My first TV shop was
 with a station that never went on the air WREP Channel 25. To this day
 I don't know exactly what happened. The studio was finished on
 Commonwealth Ave in Allston and they had a contract with the Celtics.
 They ran out of money and never even aired a test pattern.

 They vanished and a few years later WXNE got the allocation.




 On 2/27/08, Sid Schweiger <sid@wrko.com> wrote:
 > >> 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
 > WMKK/WRKO/WVEI/WVEI-FM
 > 20 Guest St / 3d Floor
 > Brighton MA  02135-2040
 > P: 617-779-5369
 > F: 617-779-5379
 > E: sid@wrko.com
 >
 >
 >