![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Project AE...
My first encounter with ham radio occurred during elementary school, if memory serves, when I visited the apartment of a friend who—as it happened—was a young radio amateur. His station was small, but real, and its performance put to shame all the flashing lights that passed for high technology on television. It would be another quarter century or so before I jumped into the hobby, inspired by several ham colleagues I worked with at Borland.
I came out of that first test session—a fairly short multiple-choice test of knowledge and a 5-word-per-minute Morse code test—with a "Technician Plus" qualification, which reverted to "Technician" ten years later when the time came to renew the license. In the intervening years, I had done little other than chew the rag on the 2-meter band. Another decade and several months passed before I worked up the initiative to take the mulitple-choice exam for the "General" class through the auspices of the Clear Lake Amateur Radio Club (CLARC) near our place in Seabrook a couple of months back. Few things promote an interest in ham radio like being cheek-by-jowl to a technically oriented facility such as the Johnson Space Center (although I am told there is a separate JSC ARC, too, that's actually based at the center).
Upon advancing to General, I realized that I was now only one step from the "top of the heap," the Extra class. Unlike the General class, however, the Extra question pool is significantly larger (700 questions) and the test consists of 50 questions instead of 35 for the General exam. Thus began my Project "Advanced Extra," or AE for short.
If I found the questions in the General pool to be a mixture of knowledge I already possessed and knowledge relatively easily assimilated, the Extra pool was almost very nearly a complete mystery to me when I started. I failed my first test exam (taken online), and it was not a close thing.
The conventional wisdom to taking the ham exams is to not try to memorize the answers. As far as trying to associate a letter choice with any particular question number or question wording, the advice is excellent. But in a larger sense, I think it would be really hard to lock down what you need to know to pass the Extra exam without memorization. So I memorized, using the mnemonic techniques I've been studying, and even woke up some old synapse paths to relearn the manipulation of complex numbers.
I had planned to take the exam last month, but things were so well and truly crazy in early October, there was no time to do anything but eat, sleep and work. Fortunately, CLARC organizes an exam session every month, so I took the Extra exam this morning and passed it. I didn't ace it, but I didn't "just squeak by," either.
As a test of my mnemonic skills, I'd describe the result in similar terms. I found out the hard way that I had not created a sufficiently vivid picture to successfully retain the information in some cases. Fortunately, Joshua Foer, in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, revealed a very helpful (to me) tidbit in this regard: this kind of thing happens to world-class memory competitors, too, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I have no such grand designs.
Besides, I passed the exam!
I came out of that first test session—a fairly short multiple-choice test of knowledge and a 5-word-per-minute Morse code test—with a "Technician Plus" qualification, which reverted to "Technician" ten years later when the time came to renew the license. In the intervening years, I had done little other than chew the rag on the 2-meter band. Another decade and several months passed before I worked up the initiative to take the mulitple-choice exam for the "General" class through the auspices of the Clear Lake Amateur Radio Club (CLARC) near our place in Seabrook a couple of months back. Few things promote an interest in ham radio like being cheek-by-jowl to a technically oriented facility such as the Johnson Space Center (although I am told there is a separate JSC ARC, too, that's actually based at the center).
Upon advancing to General, I realized that I was now only one step from the "top of the heap," the Extra class. Unlike the General class, however, the Extra question pool is significantly larger (700 questions) and the test consists of 50 questions instead of 35 for the General exam. Thus began my Project "Advanced Extra," or AE for short.
If I found the questions in the General pool to be a mixture of knowledge I already possessed and knowledge relatively easily assimilated, the Extra pool was almost very nearly a complete mystery to me when I started. I failed my first test exam (taken online), and it was not a close thing.
The conventional wisdom to taking the ham exams is to not try to memorize the answers. As far as trying to associate a letter choice with any particular question number or question wording, the advice is excellent. But in a larger sense, I think it would be really hard to lock down what you need to know to pass the Extra exam without memorization. So I memorized, using the mnemonic techniques I've been studying, and even woke up some old synapse paths to relearn the manipulation of complex numbers.
I had planned to take the exam last month, but things were so well and truly crazy in early October, there was no time to do anything but eat, sleep and work. Fortunately, CLARC organizes an exam session every month, so I took the Extra exam this morning and passed it. I didn't ace it, but I didn't "just squeak by," either.
As a test of my mnemonic skills, I'd describe the result in similar terms. I found out the hard way that I had not created a sufficiently vivid picture to successfully retain the information in some cases. Fortunately, Joshua Foer, in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, revealed a very helpful (to me) tidbit in this regard: this kind of thing happens to world-class memory competitors, too, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I have no such grand designs.
Besides, I passed the exam!
no subject
no subject