AA9PW FCC Exam Practice

I’ve just started the process of updating the commercial exam pools. This is long overdue but hopefully shouldn’t take me too long to complete once things going. I have a test version of Element 1 available, you can find a link to this at the bottom of the Commercial Exam page.
Current pools are now available for the Elements 1,3,8 and 9, the old outdated pools have been removed.

I’m playing around with the layout and styles to make it more readable – its still a bit rough at the moment. Give it a try, let me know what you think. If there are any bugs, please let me know and I’ll work on fixing them over the next few days, along with adding in some of the other question pools.

Simon.

Jeannie Stamberger and the folks at Crisis Commons are looking for volunteers to help them connect Ham Radio to the other disaster services being deployed in support of the floods in Pakistan. The goal is to create tools and processes to help integrate information transmitted via radio with some of the available online crisis integration platforms which already pull in data sources like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

More info below, to volunteer see: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/HAM_Radio_to_Digital.

Continue Reading »

Thanks to everyone who emailed me about a few of the questions in the extra exam which were a little messed up (‘conjoined questions’ – the answers of one question tagged on to the end of the answers from the previous question in the pool). Questions E9A12, E5A17 and E7H06 were affected. I have fixed these now so the answers for these questions are as they should be and the missing questions are back in the practice exam.

Please let me know if there are any other problems.

Cheers, Simon. AA9PW

I have changed the file formats for the morse code audio files and also changed how the files are served on the web page. For many years the files were being created as sun format .au sound files, these are easy for me to create programmatically but can be rather large files, especially for QSOs at the slower speeds. Since I moved hosting companies this has caused me to run through my allocated bandwidth in about 5 days! I’m upgrading the bandwidth but at the same time my hosting company very helpfully installed some software packages to enable me to ditch the .au files in favor of the more modern mp3 format.

Continue Reading »

The question pool for the amateur (ham) radio Extra class license exams is set to change over at the end of June 2008. The new question pool that will be used for exams taken from July 1st 2008 onwards is now available for practice at AA9PW.com. You can practice either a complete exam or work on the material a section at a time and all figures are provided. If you are interested, you can download the complete question pool in MS Word or PDF format from the NVEC site.

Simon, AA9PW

They said it would never happen but I have finally got around to updating the site to bring it kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Granted, some of the HTML from 1996 is still here at the moment but over time that too will fade away. I am using WordPress to manage the web pages, the exam and morse code generation is still done by the old perl scripts. Eventually I’ll upgrade these too but for now its going to be nice just to have the site looking more respectable.

Continue Reading »