My desire to get back into amateur radio coincided with my preparations to return to the corporate world. After 18 months of working for myself vending antique hand tools online and building custom woodworking projects and various knick knacks, it was time to get some steady income going. That meant brushing off my resume and catching up with what’s been going on in the areas I had specialized in. After hooking up with an agency, landing a decent job took only 2 weeks.
That was the good news. The bad news is that it was now the holiday season, which would slow down what they termed the “onboarding process.” Also, since this was a “Position of Public Trust”, it required a “Public Trust” clearance by the Federal government. The preliminary phase of which takes 3-4 weeks. At that time you’ll get a conditional clearance and are able to get IDs and get started. At some point it ends, but I am not sure when. After 2 months I got interviewed by an OPM agent (really a contractor to the FBI) and in the two months since, I have heard nothing. I’ve been going on the assumption that any day that doesn’t end with handcuffs and a raincoat is a good one and leave it at that.
Also, the interviewing process revealed some holes in my programming toolbox and some rust on some existing skills. Really, I was personally shocked how fast the minutiae of programming leaked out of my brain. The hiring manager suggested I make good use of the time to bone up on these areas and be ready to roll when the clearance came through. Actually I have to thank her for hiring me on the strength of my resume and realizing what 18 months “off” might do.
The boning up process jump started my technical reading, which can’t be approached in the same way that fiction or pleasure reading can, at least by me. I actually enjoy this mode of learning and it took no time at all to knock down 6 books on Java programming, well, really associated technologies like the Struts2 framework, jQuery, etc. Once my mind is in that mode I end up reading some fairly technical stuff “for fun” as a break. This is how I’ve ended up reading so deeply on subjects like Cosmology and Astronomy and such.
Of course, my new target was radio and electronics. I had a pretty good layman’s grasp of electronics and how most things work. Like, for instance, that current really flows the opposite way from what most people think (current is composed completely of electrons, which are negatively charged, I’ll wait while you think this through…).
OK, moving on. But, I was troubled that couldn’t answer some basic questions that I felt were pretty obvious and likely to be ones asked by my children. For instance, how, exactly, does a capacitor or a transistor work. I knew what they did, but why did that really work? Why aren’t transistors “used up” over time? So I started off really researching basic electronics.
You’d be surprising how poor an explanation you’ll get from the typical electronics text on the nature of semiconductors. They get to a certain point and then some hand waving occurs and they move on. The implication is that they details delve into particle physical or astrology or something. If you were to ask my questions of an electrical engineer or, heaven help you, an EE professor you’ll quickly get into an area of physics not meant to be tread by folks hoping to get laid ever again. So, I had to supplement these books with a lot of quality time with Professor Google. Happily, there are some talented people out there willing to make web pages for idiots like me.
While this was going on I picked up the book by Technician Class 2010-2014 Gordon West (WB6NOA). If you’ve never heard “Gordo” talk, it’s hard to explain. There are few people that speak so enthusiastically about…whatever he’s speaking about at the moment. He has a “big” voice, like one you get through a lifetime of public speaking and radio/TV hosting. The book comes with a breathless 60 min audio tour of amateur radio on the accompanying CD.
The book is specifically a study manual for the FCC Element 2 exam, which is what the FCC calls the Technician class test (Element 1 was the now defunct Novice class written exam). As I’ve mentioned before, the question pools for all the amateur radio exams are publicly available. So why shell out $17 for a study guide? I may have mentioned this, but the material is fairly technical. Having a distilled version of the stuff you need to know to pass is handier than researching all the answers yourself.
In a good/bad thing, Gordo slightly reorganized the material from the tests. There is some overlap between the various areas on the test and in an effort to make the progression of material more logical and comprehensible he moved some stuff around. If I were coming at this with no knowledge, this would have been even more of a good thing. As it was, I hopped around a bit to follow a thread when I was studying the exam pool itself.
That was part two: I printed out the whole 350 question exam pool and basically read through it about 3 times. Between the end of the first pass and the end of the third I started taking the practice exams on eHam.net. Highly recommended. By the time I got through the third pass I was pretty sick of these questions and was scoring a pretty consistent 90% +- 5%.
Continued…