I passed all three levels of Amateur Radio written exams today, in one sitting, because of one of my spouse’s friends. Passing all three is maybe unusual, but there’s a story behind this and maybe some things to think about. Like, for example, why did I just swallow a giant gumball of knowledge? Well, it’s about three different… watershed events. And a pun.
One day, a mysteriously labeled box from a company that I’d probably have ordered from were I to order order esoteric technological things off of Amazon showed up, except I hadn’t ordered anything technological so I wasn’t expecting anything so I just left the box sitting there. Eventually my spouse explained what was going on.
See, one of her friends lives the next town over from Asheville, NC. After the hurricane and giant flooding incident where ham radio was one of the few forms of communication that actually worked, the friend went through their social circle and gave a bunch of people a lecture on why they want a ham radio. Which meant that my darling spouse purchased the recommended Yaesu FT-60 radio because, more or less, she figured if she didn’t, then we’d live through a disaster and wish we’d taken her friend’s advice.
Now, getting a Ham Radio license had been maybe on the list of things I should do at some point. Before my time, ham was a great way to communicate with people all over the world, one of the few actual working ways to do so. When I was but a pimply faced youth, it was in kind of a weird state, because you could reach around the world with ham radio, but you could also do that with the Internet… and the Internet offered you a bunch of new and interesting things to do. So I’d never really gotten around to it, although I know I’d checked the ARRL book out from the library a few times.
Something felt a bit different this time?
In 1990, the hip-hop band Public Enemy released the song ”911 is a joke” which got a lot of people angry because it specifically referenced how poorly the 911 system works in a Black neighborhood, therefore causing a bunch of white people to bellyache about how 911 works great in their neighborhood and why would you write a song encouraging kids to prank-call 911 and things like that. But I was just thinking about how we’d all go to this one site, collectively, whenever there was small earthquake or other such thing, except that most people I care about don’t go to that site because it’s not friendly to them anymore. And every time there’s been a power outage, my cell phone service has gone to nothingness. So when my spouse’s friend mentioned that ham radio was the only thing that worked… well, what if 911 is a joke? The problem that Public Enemy wrote a song about in 1990 hasn’t been fixed, but now we’ve found an entirely new way to screw things up.
Plain old radio just works and doesn’t really require infrastructure. There’s a reason why a cheap Baofeng radio (but no license) is part of the tactical-chic outfit.
Ham radio is the product of a lot of compromises over how to effectively use the very limited resource that is the radio spectrum. Because all of the other license classes were effectively making money on the airwaves as broadcasters or professional radio services ranging from aircraft communication to routing taxis, amateur radio was defined as the absence of commerce while also not being part of any sort of government service like the public safety radio bands.
Amateur radio service also ran up against the Sputnik Crisis. One of the stated goals of the licensing in the US is “Education” which is also why the tests don’t just cover the things that you must know, but also a lot of the things that you should know. There’s three levels to the license. The lowest, Technician, lets you get on the VHF and UHF bands that our radio uses, and requires you to know basic-level electronics like Ohm’s law, RF safety, and a variety of other subjects. The second level, General, gets you most, but not all, of the shortwave bands and requires a more in-depth understanding of things where watts and space weather and stuff appear. The final level, Amateur Extra, goes pretty far deep into things, but gives you all of the privileges.
I mean, you don’t need them. But if you are a little extra… why not be Amateur Extra?
Now, I was starting with a giant advantage. There’s a bunch of things that are basically an accident of birth, of course, but also I already knew a lot of electronics stuff and other random factoids, all of which are things that the test want you to make sure you know. I design switching power supplies and other interesting electronics bits for fun.
My spouse’s friend had an app that they swore by, Ham Study so my spouse purchased it and I had it on my iPad.
Meanwhile, horrible things were happening, which I’m not going to go into, but it turns out that one of the best ways to break the cycle of doomscrolling or general purpose malaise is to instead grab a flashcard app.
If I’d gone into the ham radio test cold, I’d have failed. Because the syllabus makes sure you understand things like why amateur radio exists, legally speaking, so there’s some trivia you need to memorize. However, I soon got to the point where the lowest level test, Technician, seemed possible. I actually felt like the test was well structured towards a practical and casual rule-of-thumb based approach to RF electronics in a way that I might not have gotten had I taken an actual college level RF electronics class. There’s a few actual important equations that you needed to understand but a lot of times you could much more quickly and easily get close enough to pick out the right answer.
However, the earliest time I’d be able to practically sit for a test was still some weeks off. And the test studying was good for shutting all of the extraneous thoughts out for a while. General seemed easy, even if Amateur Extra still seemed imposing.
One of the libraries I have an Overdrive/Libby account on had Michael Burnett’s series of study books so I started reading through those, not necessarily because of the questions so much but because it filled in a lot of the gaps.
Anyway, at some point I realized that the callsign system is such that Technician and General are in the same callsign pool and only Extra gets the cool person shorter callsign and wouldn’t it be fun to be that new guy on the airwaves with the Extra callsign?
While I was starting to think that maybe I’d be able to pass the Extra test, the tsunami happened. Or, well, didn’t. See, one of my friends used to be all of the way on the other side of the golden gate from me, such that we saw each other seldom. And now she’s a few miles away. And so first we get the “earthquake coming” alert on our phones, followed by the “tsunami warning” alert. And so we’re texting back and forth and I’d remembered that I’m high enough away from the shores that I have a very minimal tsunami risk… but she’s closer to the shores so I didn’t want to tell her that things were fine even though I was pretty sure they were.
Except that the site hosting the official tsunami risk map was down and it was using some GIS system to generate the map which meant that the wayback machine couldn’t help.
The problem with a “for emergencies only” system is that nobody uses it and therefore nobody knows if it’ll actually work in an emergency. The problem with a “base load is very low but if there’s an emergency people really care about it all of the sudden” system is that it will go down in an emergency.
Part of why Amateur Radio works in emergencies is the same reason as that one site folks used to use works. It has regular use and has attributes that scale well to emergency usage. And thus we’ve stumbled into a world where cell phones don’t work in a crisis because we accidentally got rid of our land lines and any land-line-level-resiliency measures had to get retrofitted into the business model, we engaged into a world where government agencies like the National Weather Service posted to a platform that made sense at the time but haven’t migrated to any of the new platforms.
My area has an organized ARES/RACES (due to how things evolved over time, there are two parallel amateur radio emergency services that most areas have merged) system. So, literally, I guess the real question that I was vaguely trying to answer is “Okay, so where do I go to talk about the earthquake now that I don’t go there because it sucks now.” The local ARES/RACES has a radio net for that. Since I had the radio, I eavesdropped on the weekly radio net check-in.
Anyways, I’d managed to squeak by an Extra practice test a week or so ago and it looked like I’d be able to make a testing session run by W6VEC (the FCC doesn’t actually give you a license, they work with a collection of Volunteer Examiner Coordinator groups to actually administer the test, W6VEC is one of those groups that only runs one examination) so I signed up.
Anyway, there I was on a rainy day, amidst a storm so heavy that San Francisco got it’s first tornado warning ever, at the local testing run by W6VEC. I’d just swallowed a giant glob of knowledge… somewhat to make a pun, somewhat to feed my ego, somewhat because things just plain suck. Then again, it’s $15 to take the test, no matter how many sections you take, so if I could do them all at once, I’d save some money.
I’m still kinda amused and surprised that I actually pulled this off. I’ll probably get AK6-something-something, depending on how many other people decide they are Extra. But, considering that San Francisco got woken up by a tornado warning, I guess it was a good idea?