Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series.
Two meters got amateurs into VHF in 1946, but the real transformation of local ham radio took another three decades to arrive, once hams pushed into UHF and figured out what to do with repeaters. This period covers a lot of ground, from new band allocations and a total license overhaul to the FM repeater boom of the 1970s.
The 1951 license overhaul
In 1951, the FCC scrapped the old Class A, B, and C system entirely and replaced it with six named classes: Novice, Technician, Conditional, General, Advanced, and Amateur Extra. The Novice, aimed squarely at newcomers, required only a 5 word per minute code test and a basic written exam, but it came with real restrictions: crystal-controlled CW only on limited HF segments, 75 watts maximum, and originally just a one-year, non-renewable term meant to push new hams to upgrade quickly. The Technician class, by contrast, was created specifically for experimentation above 220 MHz and was explicitly not meant for general communicating, a philosophy the FCC would later reverse. Novice call signs got their own distinct format too, a 2×3 pattern with the letter N inserted after the prefix, like WN2ODC, which dropped once the operator upgraded off Novice.
The UHF bands arrive
The FCC actually granted amateurs their first UHF allocations back in 1938 at the Cairo Conference, giving hams 2 and a half meters (112 MHz) and 1 and a quarter meters (224 MHz) as new bands. The 70 centimeter band amateurs use today for repeaters and digital voice work came later, developing through further postwar reallocations as amateurs pushed higher in frequency looking for open spectrum.
Satellites and a growing interest in FM
The 1960s brought the first OSCAR (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) satellites, launched in 1961 and carrying a simple 50 milliwatt beacon on 144 MHz that thousands of amateurs tuned in to copy, giving hams a new way to make VHF and UHF contacts well beyond normal line-of-sight range. This decade also saw growing interest in FM operation, setting the stage for what came next.
Incentive licensing and its backlash
Not every change in this era was welcomed. The ARRL first floated the idea of incentive licensing in 1963, arguing that operators with only General or Conditional licenses shouldn’t have full access to the same HF phone privileges as more advanced license holders, at a time when the amateur population had passed 200,000 but CB licenses already outnumbered ham licenses nationally. The FCC formally adopted the policy in 1968, stripping General and Conditional class operators of roughly half of their phone privileges on the 75 through 15 meter bands and reserving those exclusive subbands for Advanced and Amateur Extra operators as an incentive to upgrade. The idea was to reward technical achievement, but it also punished thousands of hams who’d been perfectly happy operating at the General level, and it left lasting resentment toward the ARRL among many operators who felt the League had pulled the rug out from under them, a controversy that some longtime hams still bring up decades later.
Commercial gear becomes ham gear
Repeaters didn’t really cement themselves into amateur operations until the 1970s, and the reason is almost accidental. When the FCC tightened bandwidth requirements for commercial land mobile users, it created a wave of outdated commercial repeater equipment on 2 meters and 440 MHz that hams could acquire and retool for amateur use. That secondhand equipment boom is a big part of why repeater networks expanded so quickly on both bands during this decade.
New HF bands too
This wasn’t purely a VHF and UHF story. Hams also gained new privileges on the 10, 18, and 24 MHz bands in 1979, rounding out the HF allocations that are still mostly in place today.
285,000 licensed hams by 1970
By 1970, the US amateur population had grown to roughly 285,000, nearly five times the 1946 postwar figure. Repeaters, in particular, made the hobby far more approachable for casual, local communication, a shift that helped drive that growth and laid the groundwork for the personal radio services that would spin off from amateur radio’s UHF neighborhood over the following decades.
Sources
- 1951 Licensing Structure Decision, Amateur Radio Licensing in the US
- Historical Events in Amateur Radio, eham.net
- A History of Amateur Radio License Changes, Eastern Massachusetts ARRL
Previous: 1946, the 2 meter band opens. Next up: 1987, when GMRS split off as its own service.