{"id":5738,"date":"2017-03-04T20:46:03","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T02:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/?p=5738"},"modified":"2017-03-04T20:46:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T02:46:03","slug":"ham-radio-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/?p=5738","title":{"rendered":"Ham Radio Testing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[Today: 4 miles]<\/p>\n<p>After my run this morning I went to the ham radio club building to help with a testing session.\u00a0 I had not done that in quite a while.<\/p>\n<p>They ended up having twice as many test helpers as they needed, but everybody got to participate and it all was good.<\/p>\n<p>There were 6 people being tested and 5 of them had at least some success.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know why #6 didn&#8217;t do so well, but his answer sheet was way off from our answer key template thing.\u00a0 I guess he will have to try again.<\/p>\n<p>The testing costs a little bit of money.\u00a0 I think right now it is $15.\u00a0 There are three test levels.\u00a0 You can start from zero, pay the money and keep going up as long as you pass.\u00a0 So you could potentially get it all done in one go for one money.\u00a0 Another thing you can do: if you fail you can sometimes pay the $15 again and try again.\u00a0 You can keep doing that until the testers say, &#8220;go home.&#8221;\u00a0 I don&#8217;t remember anyone ever doing the 2nd try thing but we had two people today pass at one level and make a stab at the next level.\u00a0 Neither passed it.\u00a0 But it is free so why not?<\/p>\n<p>We have a guy in the club who runs the testing sessions and keeps the test materials all nicely filed and up to date.\u00a0 He runs the test session.\u00a0 The rest of us do a bit of preparation work, checking people&#8217;s ID cards, etc. , but mostly we do the scoring and fill out paperwork.\u00a0 You have to have three testers sign the documentation when someone passes.\u00a0 So the smallest test crew you can have is three.<\/p>\n<p>We like to see people pass.\u00a0 But we don&#8217;t bend the rules or accept any funny business.\u00a0 On the other hand, we wouldn&#8217;t know if someone had a hidden cheat sheet or whatnot&#8230; as long as they could manage it while three guys are sitting there staring at them.\u00a0 I would be surprised if anyone takes it that far.\u00a0 The material isn&#8217;t that hard, honestly.\u00a0 And the questions are all available on the internet as are sample tests.\u00a0 There is a &#8220;question pool&#8221; that is published.\u00a0 Each testee gets assigned a semi-unique testing book, so you can&#8217;t copy off of another person.\u00a0 But if you can memorize facts you could pass.<\/p>\n<p>Like I said, we like to see people pass.\u00a0 We have no control over what questions are in which testing book or what the &#8220;right&#8221; answers are.\u00a0 That is all built into the question pool system.\u00a0 There is no time limit and we try to be quiet and let the people do the best they can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Today: 4 miles] After my run this morning I went to the ham radio club building to help with a testing session.\u00a0 I had not done that in quite a while. They ended up having twice as many test helpers as they needed, but everybody got to participate and it all was good. There were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5739,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions\/5739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}