I was invited to a wedding last weekend, and although it was not especially a "ham wedding", the groom was DD6ULF. One other guest (DD6UDS) and me were the only non-family guests, so amateur radio still meant something to Ulf.

Good luck to Ulf and Anke!

I already ranted about the exam, the law etc. Here are some pics from the NCC facility in Gaoxiong. Let us start with how/where the exam is conducted.

You will sit at such a computer. The computer is in the office, vehicles will drive by sometimes (though the area is rather silent), people will walk in, out and by, talk etc. When I went there, the house across the street underwent some kind of construction. There are no headphones to shield ambient noise. Questions appear written on the screen and are not read out aloud. On the left you see another "exam station", on the right is the "conversation room" - a small table and four seats. Right of that is the entrance.

Here are all kinds of fees. Missing on this list is the exam fee of NT$200, the same for all exams. That means you pay NT$200 for class 3, NT$400 (written and morse) for class 2 and NT$200 for class 1. The "amateur radio phone station license" is not correct (not even in Chinese), this should be a "movable amateur radio station license". (I do not want to use "mobile", because that usually means operation on a vehicle. The term used here, 行動式, just means that your station is not fixed.) The inspection fee for this is only NT$100 in comparison to the NT$500 for the fixed station because you bring the transceiver (or transmitter) in, while they have to go your place for the fixed station inspection.The NT$500 are for the card you can see further down.

A nice touch: You can check your blood pressure at all times, in case you remembered the garbage written in the law, the extremely intelligent and useful exam questions, or that the call sign is not actually given to you. As you can see in the upper right corner, this is right next to the fee table. What I did not photograph was the spectrum analyzer they use to verify your transceiver's power and harmonic emissions. I wonder though how far up that toy goes. Would they be able to test 10GHz equipment? How about 24GHz? Hmm, this may be worth another try...

Here you can see the class 2 license I was issued. Not much here, just my name and photo, no address, no ID number. So anyone with the same name and somehow looking the same (You may have noticed that rather large numbers of Asians have black hair and wear glasses...) could use this one, there is no unique identification item.

The back is insofar interesting as it is not quite correct. Considering how meticulous these people can be when they want to restrict you, it is funny that they issue a license with incorrect data. I tested in Gaoxiong, not in Taibei. And I was sitting there when this license was printed, so I know for sure that this did not happen in Taibei. Do they care? No, because this is their mistake, not yours. Their mistakes are not important, not even mistakes, only yours are.

Above is my station license. Above the table it says "movable (or non-fixed) amateur radio station license", then comes another faux pas: The first line is the "station name" (電台名稱). It is not "station type" or "station category", but still, as you can see, they wrote the same again: Movable amateur radio station... I already mentioned that the civil servants and the people who wrote the amateur radio law here in Taiwan do not understand amateur radio. They just see it as another kind of commercial radio, and here it shows again. The second line is the "owner" of this station - me. Please observe that there is no call sign on the front, only a note saying that this license has to be used in combination with the amateur radio license - which states not call sign either. So I have a license class 2, and I own an amateur radio station, but that is about it. To the back:

Here it gets interesting: The column on the outmost left says "radio device", so here you will find informations regarding the transmitter. (They do not care for receivers, only transmitters.) The first line is brand and type. I bought a cheap 2m HT for this, but I wonder what they would write for a homebrew transceiver. The transmitter's serial number must of course be registered in line two. Line three lists the output power (Does this thing really emit exactly 4.3000W?) and then (drum roll) the call sign. See? The transmitter has a call sign, not me! Now this is really stupid and is not even done in commercial radio.

Btw, the frequency range in the last line is the range where the device actually transmits. If your transceiver can transmit outside amateur radio bands - fail. What they either fail to notice or do not care about is that not only this cheap HT is only restricted through software. Press the right keys and it is "open"... You also get a sticker put onto your transmitter. It contains the device serial number, type etc, and funnily my ID - but not my name, and also not the transmitter's call sign.

One last reason to laugh (or cry, decide yourself): Fines. This flyer (A4 size, available in the NCC office for free) tries to convince you to "go legal", because otherwise you may be fined NT$100k to NT$500k. Ha, now this is a joke. The only people who could be fined are radio amateurs (and this fine also applies if you use frequencies or output powers that were not "approved"). If they would indeed go for illegals, they would swim in money, but also be in lots of trouble, because many of the illegal operators inside amateur bands or with amateur equipment do this commercially - and are sometimes linked to some legislator or other "powerful" person. So, the only people who could be fined, are those who try to be as legal as possible, everyone else is just fine.

Btw, the stupidity of the laws and regulations also shows in this rule: You need to show proof of where your transmitter comes from. You do this by either providing a receipt (which is why I bought a HT) or getting the ownership transferred from another station. Or you can "try" to import a device. (import permit...) It is not possible however to buy a second hand transceiver that someone used illegally, because then you can not provide the necessary "proof of origin". Why this "proof of origin" (來源證明) is necessary - no, you better not ask. But this rule effectively prevents the number of illegal transmitters from being reduced - good job!

Lovely...