Getting myself into trouble, one commit at a time.
On November 20th, I took and passed all three ham radio tests, and got my Amateur Extra license. Thing is, I was on a very tight budget. Nevertheless, I managed to find a number of resources that were able to make this process an enjoyable one.
Ham Radio is an odd hobby. I got into it because I was studying electrical physics and circuit analysis in college, and I had a friend at the local cigar shop that was active in the hobby.
My college experience was not a spectacular one, and my professional career went in mostly a different direction, so the opportunity to put some of the skills I picked up in circuits classes to use was an appealing one. Beyond that, however, a few other points drew me to it.
If you’re sold, keep reading!
Briefly, here’s the process:
I mentioned that I studied circuit analysis. That meant that I had at least some familiarity with the electrical principles on all three tests, which obviously helped quite a lot. I’d also studied up to Calc III, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations, so obviously the math part of the test wasn’t going to pose a significant obstacle.
However, there’s still quite a lot of material on the test that is either rote memorization (frequency allocation and power limits were the biggest gotchas here), or just “general knowledge” that has accreted over the century and change ham radio has been around, or thing that wouldn’t have come up in a traditional college Circuits I or II course.
The advice I got from my Elmer (Ham Mentor) was essentially to take practice tests until I was scoring 85-90%, then take my Technician’s test. “Don’t overthink it.”
Well, I never really got to the point to where I was hitting that mark consistently, in no small part due to the fact that I was trying to memorize a pile of facts that I had no other connection to.
This is where HamStudy.org comes into play. Unlike other practice test resources, this provides an explanation of the question, rather than the usual “it was D” answer one comes to expect from other test sites.
These explanations will regularly go into a full explanation of the mathematical calculation needed, and/or cite both Wikipedia and YouTube sources for further background. This was tremendously valuable to me. I don’t think I could have passed if I didn’t have this. I certainly would not have gotten all the way to Amateur Extra.
W4EEY’s channel was also invaluable, for a variety of reasons. First, it provided more context about the material I was studying, which I found very valuable. Second, the classes are available as mp3 downloads, which meant I could listen on the go, while shopping or driving. This isn’t always ideal – the material is made with the intent of being seen, as well as heard, so you’ll sometimes be subjected to the usual “As you can see…” trap. But, even so, it’s useful.
W4AEW has a great youtube channel with a lot of very well-explained ham radio material. One of the answers in HamStudy.org pointed me to his channel, and his stuff has explained a lot of things that were very tricky.
All this is great, but there’s one thing I never quite saw the pattern behind, and that’s frequency allocations. With these questions, I largely had to just guess. I discovered that if a question was asking something like “What frequency is on the 15M band?”, it was never the one that was exactly on it (300 / 15M = 20MHz), but very close to it.
The best resource I found for this was just staring at the frequency allocation chart the ARRL provides. Obviously the best case here is to have it hanging in your ham shack, but if you don’t have the means for that right off, the PDF is pretty browsable. :)
Finally, Pocket RxTx was very useful in “getting my feet wet” as I was studying. You can’t transmit with this app (and you can’t transmit before you get your license anyway), but you can hop on a WebSDR and scroll around the bands and listen for conversations. It was quite motivating to me to be able to scroll around, stumble across AM stations, and catch people having voice conversations on SSB across the world. It’s a zero-cost way to start putting the material you’re studying to use.
The local library here in Republic, WA, is staggeringly good. It’s electronic library is the most extensive and well supported I’ve ever seen. Aside from this, one thing they also do is take purchase requests. Since I didn’t have the spare cash to buy the ARRL manuals, I submitted the Tech, General, and Amateur Extra books as suggestions. All three were accepted – but, the Tech and General books arrived the day after my test, and the AE one has yet to come in.
That being said, if you’re on a budget, talk to your local library and see if they have a similar program.
I need to find a good circuits class to add to this list. It’s a significant part of the material on the three tests, and it was an equally significant part of why I passed the tests. My college classes were generally unimpressive, so I’ll have to find a lecture series that explains things well.
The good news is, you’ll know your results right away. The bad news is, if you’re starting from nothing, you won’t be able to use your hard-won privileges until your callsign appears in the FCC’s Universal License System.
Finding yourself in this can be a bit of a trick. If you got your FRN, you can search by that and see if the paperwork has been processed. If you didn’t, you’ll have to search by your name. This is in a very particular format of:
LastName Suffix, FirstName MI
It gets even more complicated if you have a capitalized repeated letter in a name. Ask Me, Adam McCullough, how I know…
Alternatively, you can also search for changes made around a geographic region within a certain period of time here. You can narrow the geographic component down to the address you gave on exam day.
Moral of the story: Get your FRN. :)
Now, you get a radio and start making contacts! If you didn’t pass all three, keep studying for the other test(s) you have left. If you did pass everything, consider becoming a Volunteer Examiner!
If you found this helpful, or if you have further questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. My contact info is on the homepage of this blog. Reach out!