As I mentioned in the last post, I was in the process of pulling together some electronic stuff to do with Marcus. One of the things that I got was an Arduino microcontroller. It’s all the rage these days in the maker/hacker crowd and it’s cheap. For $17 you get a microcontroller on a board with a bunch of standard ports for IO and expansion. It also has a series of header pins in a standard arrangement that allows people to make expansion boards (called shields). It’s a nice expandable system where you don’t have to do all the low level work but there is still a lot of room for hacking (in the original sense of the word, as I will use it throughout this blog.
Anyways, at some point in comparing the various versions of the Arduino board and accessories I came across this BAOFENG radio. This is a Chinese made dual band hand held transceiver for the 2m and 70cm ham bands. All such handhelds are known as HTs regardless of brand. And this radio came in like 8 colors and ran from $35 to $75 on eBay and Amazon depending on the vendor and exact version. An amazing price, if they worked. Back in the day, a 2m handheld ran a couple hundred dollars and was a pretty basic affair.
So I looked around and there was a very active user community on Yahoo providing things like programming support and a user manual that didn’t suck. So they must be real I supposed. Well, one way to find out, I ordered one. And in a few days I had a UV-5RA of my very own. Then it was time to plug in a few of the local repeaters and hear what was going on.
Just for clarity’s sake since not everyone reading this, assuming anyone is reading this, it is legal to listen on the ham bands without a license, you just can’t transmit. And enforcement of the amateur radio rules is something the FCC takes fairly seriously.
Well, the next step was pretty obvious, I needed a license. My Novice ticket had long expired and that license level didn’t have privileges on the 2m band anyway. What I needed was a Technician class license, the lowest level to have such privileges.
Well, some research showed that while I wasn’t looking, the FCC had simplified the licensing process. There are now only 3 levels of license with increasing privilege levels: Technician, General and Extra. And there was no longer a requirement to demonstrate Morse Code proficiency along the way, yay!
There used to be 5 classes, starting with the Novice class and with an Advanced class stuck in between General and Extra. At Novice you needed to be able to do 5 wpm of Morse Code, at General 13 wpm and Extra was 20 or 25 wpm. The other classes didn’t have a code requirement and were like a stepping stone type thing between levels. In addition, the FCC turned over the administration of the tests to VECs (Volunteer Examination Coordinators). So you no longer had to troop down to the Federal Building to take the test. The tests are also free in most cases. The VECs also coordinate the question pools for the exams and the pools themselves are public.
How different that is from the various certification tests I have taken in the IT industry where the tests are “secret”, as if anything was truly secret from Google, and focused on corner cases and trivia. The Amateur Radio exams focused on the stuff that you actually needed to know without too many tricks.
Like most cert exams, the bar is crazy low, 74% is mastery. The tests are 35 multiple choice questions in 9 or 10 areas from a total pool of about 350. All I needed to do was pass the first of these tests and I was back “in” and could talk with my handheld.
Our next installment will cover the study process and the test.
Stay Tuned 🙂