Monday, July 18, 2016

We Passed!

Nate got his amateur radio license a few months ago and challenged Toby that if he studied hard he could take the Technician test and get a license too. Nate helped Tobias understand frequency, wavelength, calculating voltage/resistance/current, safety, text-taking skills, FCC rules and a lot of new vocabulary.
There are 350 questions to study for the Technician level exam; some are calculations and some are simply memorizing various rules and terms. They studied a different topic each night like FCC rules or Ohm's law.
With the test date approaching quickly, I helped Tobias review some things during the day. I even took a practice test and nearly passed. So Friday night I decided that I would take the test with him on Sunday.

Sunday afternoon, we had our number 2 pencils and calculators ready to go, filled out all the paperwork, and began the 35-question test. I finished and passed, and then Toby finished up his text. The text administrators counted up his wrong answers and I could see they wanted him to pass. They got up to 9 wrong answers (the maximum you are allowed), and then checked the last column of questions, which had NO mistakes! Whew! We both passed. The test administrator said they had never seen someone so young pass before.
Now we wait for our call signs to appear in the FCC database, and then we are allowed to be on the air.
I'm so proud of the hard work Tobias put in and all the things he now knows about electronics, waves, and more. He has a small radio on the way to use.

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