The absolutely correct answer is YES!
The Yes, answer refers to my thinking and to certain actions that I have undertaken. There it was staring me in the face and somehow it passed totally by me. Was it a result of ignorance or perhaps never considering I was on the wrong path or maybe a bit of being too proud to see the obvious.
So, what is N6QW talking about (now that you are on the edge of your seat). Think back to earlier generations of computers where one of the controls was indeed a RESET button. Our hobby needs a reset button!
The first thing that needs a reset is our licensing structure where you cannot hold the full extra class license without first holding a foundation license. Other countries use this approach, and it provides a measure of you have to actually know something before you can do something like turn on a KW amp with an 8kHz wide SSB signal.
Such a proposition would certainly cause a massive heart attack amongst the Newington Nerds, and it should. It was this elitist group who caused today's problem in their pursuit of Far East advertising dollars at the expense of promoting the original tenets of technology advancements like the famous Schnell/DeLoy transatlantic tests and SSB or SDR.
Immediately the cry from the peanut gallery is that this will kill the hobby. Well friend if we do nothing it is already on that path. Look at the stats as there are only some 375,000 US hams on HF. The other half of the US ham population are relegated to their Baofeng UV35R's.
An added measure is to reinstate CW as a requirement for licensing. Requiring this step back to CW would add a measure of actually building a rig and you would be allowed to use a VFO. Why we could have keyboard generated CW using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and more opportunities for shrinking down the size of rigs using SMD components. It would even cause me to design a whole crop of new CW Transceivers.
Above is the receiver board for the rig in the video below. It has the RF Amp, BPF, VTO, BFO, IF Amp, Product Detector and Audio amp. There are a couple of MMIC amps on this board. It is about 3x4 Inches
Still another step: Ask what has the ARRL really done for you today? They increased the price of QST for a simple digital download and they charge an arm and a leg if you want a paper copy. Remember the three weeks without access to LotW. Are you still confident they are your go to place?
I am not an ARRL member nor a fan of this group, just so you know. If I was, I would think really hard about continuing a membership --how about you?
Having built so many SSB transceivers -- the awakening is I need to design more CW transceivers. Any one can talk on SSB but only the few, the proud and the brave can do CW.
73's
Pete N6QW