I felt I was ready, it was time to find an exam. As I mentioned before, the exams are now administered by the amateur radio community through VECs (Voluntary Examination Coordinators) and most clubs had an accredited VE team. In fact, the Laurel (MD) club is the major VEC for the mid-Atlantic area and I could get to no less than 3 regularly scheduled monthly exam sessions within 20 miles of my house. In addition, exams are held at almost all the hamfests of which there are one or two a month within reasonable driving distance. So finding an exam was really about figuring out who had them this weekend and/or how far I felt like driving.
As it turns out, it was AARC’s (Anne Arundel Radio Club) weekend for exams. That was cool since it was at AARC that I studied for and got my Novice license 30 years ago. I had no idea what to expect, it had been so long and all of my preparation has to this point been in isolation. How many people would show up for a monthly exam? Was amateur radio still that popular?
As it turned out, there were about a dozen people testing that day including an older gentleman who was blind. The testing team didn’t miss a beat in setting up for him and also accommodating a visiting VE team from a neighboring club that was about to start up testing and wanted to observe.
They did testing in batches of 6 as that was what the big table could accommodate with the testers stationed around it. Since I was early (i.e., on time) I got into the first batch. One or two others were testing for Tech in my batch and one was going for Extra.
You are supposed to have an hour to complete the exam. For Tech and General classes the exams are 35 questions, for Extra it’s 50. Mastery is a ridiculously low 74%. That means I can miss 8 and still pass. That doesn’t sound like much but remember the exam covers A LOT of ground in terms of subject matter.
By the end of the test I felt like I might have over-prepared. I finished in something like 12 minutes; no one else was close. I hate being “that guy”. You know the one you wish you had a voodoo doll of in Chem 101 when he blew out of the exam in less than half the allotted time and looked happy. Might even have been sober. So I went through and checked every answer carefully after all, it’s easy to get out of sequence on the answer sheet, so it was good to check. By the time I was done the young guy taking the Extra had finished, so I felt I could turn it in at this point.
They tried to make it dramatic, but I knew I had passed, the only question was the score. For some reason, the FCC doesn’t want them to tell you specifics of the results of the test, so all I got out of the tester was that I had missed “a couple”. I was in fact a little disappointed. It was not initially my intention to roof the exam, but it really was rather easy. So then it became a competitive thing. There was, in fact, a flaw in my preparation since there were 2 or 3 questions that I don’t remember seeing before. If I am studying carefully, my (short term) memory is close to photographic, so I missing something somewhere. I would have to correct that for the General exam…
Anyway, it took close to 3 hours end to end, but I had my Technician license, finally. Well, I would as soon as my call sign appeared in the FCC online database, generally 2-3 days.
As it turns out it took them most of the week to get around to uploading the test data, so it wasn’t until Friday that it appeared: KB3ZYJ. Kind of a nutty sequence, but by that time I decided that I needed at least to get my General upgrade because it allows access to HF bands I really wanted to get into. Whenever you upgrade, you can request a new call sign. You could also pay extra and get a “vanity” call sign if one you like is available. I am not into vanity, especially the paying part. I just wanted something memorable and easy for the other guys to get out of a pileup. Well, we’ll see what the upgrade brings.