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Three Amateur Extra Triple Plays
On Saturday, 17 Oct 2015, we minted three new Amateur Extra class licensees, all the way from the ground up, for our son Morgan (age 20), daughter Jess (13) and me (Waifu will follow along shortly). That's right, three simultaneous triple plays: Technician, General and Amateur Extra tests passed in a single session for three people at one time. We followed a process we developed for homeschooling our children (brick-and-mortar ABET accredited Electrical Engineering degree earned at age 19 for our son, and nine college credit hours in history earned at age 11 for our daughter). I believe this process is repeatable, and can achieve similar results, regardless of your particular background. The entire amateur radio licensing swath includes Technician, General and Amateur Extra class licenses, in order. I leave it to other sources to explain all these in detail (example: ARRL's website), but to those interested in militia or community protection teams, I think everyone, no matter what their intended role, should at least get the Technician class license and start practicing for base defense or emergency center operations. This level is the communication equivalent of having a personal weapon and being able to punch holes in paper with it. The next step up, the General class license, should be the default standard, and is the communication equivalent of being able to operate in a team, even if only to lay down a base of fire, to help in a triage operation, or work in an operations center. Another advantage of a General license is that it lets three of your adult General licensees become Volunteer Examiners (VEs), and begin testing and qualifying new Technician licensees. The Amateur Extra class license adds a few features in some bands, but to me the major advantage of this class of license is that now your VEs can test and qualify new licensees at any level, including Amateur Extra. This will greatly decouple your growing team from needing to depend on others for testing. It will also allow you to help the VEs who tested you by making it easier to schedule tests and to handle when one of the VEs comes down sick. Everyone benefits from adding more Amateur Extra VEs to the mix. As a result, any sizeable group should hold itself accountable for getting three Amateur Extra VEs in place, and then start offering at least the Technician class tests at every training session. I think you should also deliberately cross-deck VEs across groups and regions, if for no other reason than to build larger coordination networks and esprit de corps, making sure that your test sessions also borrow at least one VE from elsewhere. Morgan and I will be starting the VE certification process ASAP, and then we will be available on demand wherever and whenever practical. Our total investment of time for this result was about three and one-half weeks, starting from literally zero, outside our engineering degrees, which were helpful but not sufficient nor required. My original intention was to get us all licensed at the Technician level, and then build up from there, possibly tossing myself and Morgan across the General level at the first test session if practical. So, in the last week of September, we ordered two study guides, one for the Technician class and one for the General class. The general framework of the licensing process is that there are three multiple choice question pools, as they are known, one for each of the three licensing classes (there is no longer any Morse code requirement at any level). To pass the Technician and General level exams, 26 out of 35 questions must be answered correctly. For the Amateur Extra class, 37 out of 50 questions must be answered correctly. Each unique test is drawn from the respective pool, consisting of 350, 350 and 500 questions overall, respectively. Since these questions are all multiple choice, it would be theoretically possible to memorize the answers for all the questions in the pool, but I think it is better to understand the principles involved rather than rote memorization. Yes, compared to decades passed, getting an amateur radio license has been subjected to the same "dumbing-down" as all other aspects of education in our society. Some of this change is meaningful (the addition of digital computing has changed the practical face of radio), some of it reflects changing social interaction (talking to people in other countries can now easily be done on blogs or via email or video conferencing), but some of it reflects the fact that people just aren't taught as much as they once were. It is almost embarrassing how easy it is to get licensed now versus years past. So embarrassing that to not at least try to get licensed would be even more embarrassing. In addition to being able to see, in advance, every single question (and its correct answer) which you might face in the exam, you have the further advantage that the questions on the test will be drawn from a variety of competency areas. Have trouble memorizing what VHF bands are available to the Technician class? Don't worry, you will probably only face one question out of 35 about any topic on any particular test, even though the pool may contain six to ten questions about any particular topic. Another advantage is that you can retest at the same session, with an additional $15 fee. Jess, for example, had the last leg of her triple play bounce off the dirt. She just barely missed the Amateur Extra on her first test, shook it off, paid the new fee, was handed a different test, and passed that. Sometimes the difference between passing and failing might just be the random choice of questions you drew for a particular test, and for this license, a squeaker is just as good as a blowout. The overall strategy is then: A. Define and reinforce your competency bubble. B. Gradually expand your competency bubble at the margins. C. Memorize the remainder. D. Connect and repeat, both at increasing test levels and within each level. Your three main resources (links provided later) for self-evaluation and self-study will be: 1. The ARRL study guides for each class. We found that a lot of the material on the Amateur Extra exam was already covered in the General study guide in-between General questions, and what wasn't we could synthesize from our engineering background. Along those lines, I have a 10-15 minute cram session for non-technical-types I could provide at meatspace events regarding reactance that would make a lot of those Extra-class questions make much more sense. This is derived from material taught at the Naval Academy for control systems in a way that I haven't seen in any formal Electrical Engineering courses. 2. The official question pools for each of the three classes. These you will manipulate and read through to understand the actual questions which will be asked. 3. The online practice exams available from ARRL. You can take as many of these as you want as often as you want and at no cost. They are drawn from the actual question pools, with the answers shuffled (the answer to question X isn't always C). So, get at least the Technician and General class ARRL study guides on order (plus the Extra if you want to hit that level and be able to examine others for General and Amateur Extra), and, while waiting for them to arrive begin the following process: A. Define and reinforce your competency bubble. The idea behind this step is to know what you know, and to know what you might easily learn, and to recognize what you don't know. Download and review the question pool for each test, starting with the Technician level (you'll add new levels as soon as you start consistently passing practice tests at the previous level). Try to answer each question, and divide them into these three groups: the questions you know are inside your competency bubble and which just feel right, the questions at the margins which seem familiar but perhaps just out of reach, while the remainder will be a mystery. It is OK if your competency bubble is small, even if it is only just some terms you recognize on some of the questions. We'll work on that. Even if you don't consider yourself a technical person, and don't know the answers to any of the questions, that is OK. Living in the modern world, with computers and such, you have at least heard some common terms, such as megahertz (or MHz) and gigahertz or (GHz) (processor speeds or WiFi classes), kilowatts, volts, amps, and can do basic math such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; you can build on even this simple foundation. B. Gradually expand your competency bubble at the margins. In this step, take something you know and follow a thread in any direction to learn something new. In the context of the amateur radio licensing process, you will follow these threads within the same topic, across topic areas, and across license levels. A peculiar feature of the amateur radio license test is that, with very few exceptions, there is an interconnected network of roots underlying all 1200 questions in the pool, with the questions merely being the sprouts you see above ground. Start at any point, and you will eventually find a path through the root system to all of them. Here is a simple example. Let's say all you know is that you have heard the term 2.4 Gigahertz (2.4 GHz) as applied to some WiFi device you have in the home. Let's follow those threads. One thread is giga. You learn that this is a metric prefix which means "a billion", or 109 in scientific notation. You then learn all the relevant metric prefixes, from pico, or 10-12, through Tera, or 1012. Hint: study the following metric prefixes and their scientific notation equivalents: pico, nano, micro, milli, centi, deci, kilo, mega and giga. Note that centi and deci are the oddballs, and that all the rest mean some version of multiplying or dividing by some number of thousands, or in scientific notation, powers of three. Another thread from GHz is hertz. You learn that this is a unit which means the number of cycles per second, or frequency. Now tug on each of these threads a bit. Scientific notation leads you to review the math you learned in school. Taking the square root of a power of ten means dividing that power by two (the square root of 1012 is 106). Dividing by a power of ten means changing the sign of that power (1 divided by 109 equals 10-9). Multiplying powers of ten means adding the powers (mega times pico means 106 times 10-12 which is 10-6). Hertz as a unit measuring frequency leads you to other units, such as meters, volts, amps, watts, joules, farads, henrys, ohms and what they measure. Units lead you to how to convert between them. Some units measure the same thing, such as 12 inches in one foot, 39.4 inches in one meter. Or, units can combine to make different units, such as amps times volts equals watts, or 300 divided by meters of wavelength equals frequency in MHz, and vice versa. That last one helps you to understand why HF is defined from 3 MHz (100 meters) to 30 MHz (10 meters), VHF is from 30 MHz (10 meters) to 300 MHz (1 meter), and UHF from 300 MHz (1 meter) to 3000 MHz (or 3 GHz) (0.1 meter, or 10 cm). Look where we got from just tugging on a simple thread, GHz, and seeing where it led. And don't worry about the math, the answer options are not that close. 39 inches per meter or 39.4 inches per meter or even 40 inches per meter will lead you to the same correct option on the test. The test isn't to find out whether you can do four-digit long division, it is to find out whether you know when and what to divide. Outside of tablets and phones, which are forbidden, we only have two scientific calculators. I let the kids use those while I used Waifu's basic desk calculator. It could have just as easily been an abacus or chicken bones for all the math that was needed in the time available. C. Memorize the remainder. While waiting for the study guides to arrive, Waifu and I found ourselves at the 8th NC PATCON. There, some great suggestions were passed around by various participants about using the question pools and how to work with them, particularly how to memorize the answers to questions outside of your competency bubble. One suggestion was to distill the questions down to only the correct answer, while the opposite suggestion was to bold the correct answer, leaving the distractors in place. We tried both ways, and found that for our process, leaving the distractors in place helped us learn what the meat of the question was about. Look at each question, including the distractors, and see if you can figure out rules to help you remember the correct answer. For example, I knew a guy named Gunn, and he was kind of a too-cool-for-school drinker/pot-head. The correct answer for that question includes the word "doped", so there you go. Or, George Jetson, a space kind of guy, is about two meters tall, and his height does not change, and so the correct answer for that space-sprocket question is the only one which is two meters, and two meters only. A bottle of Nair says to not use it on the perianal region, but if the moon was that close, it would be really easy to bounce, uh, "signals" off of it, so the one with "perigee" is the correct answer. If you stand in a tunnel and yell, your voice will be both amplified (it sounds louder than normal) and oscillate (you will hear an echo). This last one abuses the physics a bit, but you get the idea. Bang, four Amateur Extra class questions right there. And you will probably now never forget what "perigee" means. D. Connect and repeat. The connection and repetition is where the payoff really starts. Remind me sometime to tell you what I learned while in McDonnell Douglas' Product Development Directorate about how the Russians invent things. Consider yourself more of a people person than a technical guy? Here is where your skill at connecting people bubbles comes into play. Just think of these test questions as people you know and you want to throw a party and have everyone have a good time. The goal here is to promote memorized answers into the "I almost know that" category, and to promote those into the competency bubble. Remember the analogy of the mass of roots under the sprouts? Any thread you can find which connects between questions is helpful for this. Many of the questions in a topic group are asking for the same thing in different ways, and many topic groups connect to each other. See if you can find the pattern, and then promote them at least into the "I almost know that" category. This is why seeing the distractors also helps figure out where the common threads are. For example, there is a question which asks what is a typical UHF uplink frequency for a satellite. Knowing that UHF is between 300 MHz and 3 GHz, and that only one frequency in the list of answers is in that range, then the answer is obvious. You don't need to memorize that specific answer for that question, you only need to memorize what UHF means, and go from there. Two memorizations have now been condensed down into one. As another example, memorize the fact that ionosphere layers start at D, then go up to E, then F1 and F2, and you'll have a good chance at two or three questions from this fact alone, as well as begin attaching some of the physics and the behavior of the various layers to that knowledge. Know how to calculate DC power and voltage for the Technician class? Then add AC to that for the General, then frequency for the Amateur Extra. But this works both ways: understand that resonance is all about inductance and capacitance on a see-saw (try forgetting that image now), and you can build from that nugget not only for Amateur Extra, but for questions on the Technician and General that are leading to that level. Connect and repeat, as often as necessary. Each time you complete a cycle, take practice tests up to the appropriate level, and study the questions you missed, as well as the questions in that middle category that you answered correctly. Reward yourself not for guessing correctly, but for learning something new, which is what a correct guess actually means. Also, each time around, take each test in sequence: Technician, General and Amateur Extra. This helps finding tie-ins across tests, and is good practice for your own triple-play. Now, here are the links as promised. Following the strategy outlined in this article, visit these links, download the material as appropriate, order the study guides, and then go back to the top of this article and read it again to expand your competency bubble about your competency bubble. ARRL Study Guides These are the official study guides from ARRL, but there are many other resources on the web and in book form. I list these only because they are what we used. Make sure you get the correct edition; each exam changes every four years. ARRL Technician Class Study Guide, 3rd Edition
.
ARRL General Class Study Guide, 8th Edition
.
ARRL Amateur Extra Class Study Guide, 10th Edition
. Note that this one will be replaced in 2016, and the question pool will be updated. We didn't use this, but I would assume it would be as good as the two we did.
Official Question Pools
These are the official question pools from which the actual test questions are drawn. You can review them online, or download them in various forms for local editing as you wish. I recommend that you go through the list one-by-one and bold the correct option during your first self-evaluation.
Technician Class Question Pool.
General Class Question Pool. Note that this was recently updated.
Amateur Extra Class Question Pool. Note that this will update in 2016.
Also of interest is the No-Nonsense Study Guide series from KB6NU. These are basically the question pool in book form with supplemental explanations. He offers the Technician level for free, and sells the General and Amateur Extra versions for a very modest price. His site also has some other material of interest.
Online Practice Exams
These exams, sponsored by ARRL, can be taken as many times as desired at no cost, and only require an email to register to take them. This login is separate from the login for an ARRL member, so make sure you go to this page when you get your account setup. This login will not work on the overall ARRL page.
Online Practice Exam Portal.
Find An Exam
Finally, to find an exam in your area, visit ARRL here:
Find an Exam.
Oh, and the girl named "Aurora" from Canada? She was so stupid she spelled it "Erora". She was one of those people who kept shocking people with static all the time, and every time she opened her mouth, her voice was so raspy and fluttery that noisy, monotonic beeping sounds (CW) was all you could understand. Chalk up five more Amateur Extra questions.