Well I did a thing and made it on another govt list… passed my technician exam and it only took me about 14 years to finally take it #hamradio #ham
Discussion
Congratulations!!
#hamstr
Congrats Luke!
73
Congratulations and welcome. See you on the air!
Congrats! I’ve wanted to get my license, too.
Good job dude. Just remember while they require a name a PO Box can be used as the address.
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Great work. This has been on my list for so long. So many rabbit holes, so little time. I need to find a local club and a mentor.
Really it wasn’t hard, I listened to an audio book twice and started taking practice exams every night before bed after the first time I listened to the audio book… once I was consistently scoring 90%, I had just looked at the option of doing the online test yesterday, found a group of testers on the arrl website that just need 10 minutes of notice and did it through a zoom call. I was going to wait till the next in person testing within 50 miles which was February, but just didn’t want to wait any longer.
Hamstudy.org is a straight-up cheat code for getting your ham license. They built the testing application, too, so it all looks familiar when you test. They're also the same folks who make the Signal Stick antenna.
Yeah I took a practice exam for general last night on it just to give me an idea how I may have done it… did better than I thought, but it still would have been a fail right out the gate, but I just started the audio book for fast track to general class which was what I listened to for tech
I need to check those out for Cheese Jr. and myself. We have Extra to work on, and it's dry as hell, even for me. I thought I knew stuff, but I make about 50% on the Extra test.
Yeah it was one of the choices at HamStudy for books that they will gear practice tests towards and line up the question groups with the chapters. lol my wife actually bought me the paperback to technician class for Christmas, so I haven’t even opened the physical book, but from the audio book, it sounded like he just used his book as a guide toward narrating the audiobook, so I’m interested in seeing if there is a different style of writing to the actual physical book, but he made all the aspects of the audiobook interesting and not dry and monotonous like I figured a test prep book would be, and he explained the answers for each of the test questions pretty thoroughly by adding examples and some colorful commentary and humor mixed in. nostr:npub1c8uwtcadjcahmavp83k757rug4cm0s2wqr6mfrv5p9289ayuecuq88wkyl asked me last night if there was really a point to still give me the tech book now, but I told her I really want it for reference material because of all the explanations and techniques for stuff he mentioned in it. Michael and Kerry Burnette are the authors and they make several books for ham including some math books from what the author said.
Didn’t you share a website that sells a cheat radio to new licensees a few months back?
Yeah, QRZ and Gigaparts do it. Check the qrz.com main page for a link. It's called the QRZ-1.
Thank you, I already have a few radios, but I feel like there is no such thing as too many. Although after I get my general I’m really going to look into getting a base station or mobile for in the house, any recommendations?
Icom 7300 is on discount with the mk 2 coming, and I really like the 705. The QMX+ is a good kit for a couple hundred bucks. They say 100W and a wire, but I think 10W, a NanoVNA, and a small wire is a more efficient setup.
Some other thoughts... An OpenSpot 4 Pro is a good investment, especially with Icom stuff, because you can do D-Star. The OS4 will also let you go to DMR and YSF from your D-Star radio. It's pretty powerful. The ultimate equipment loadout might be ID-50/IC-705/OpenSpot. You could add an amp for even more flexibility, and never need to buy another piece of gear.