AA9PW FCC Exam Practice » News

Updating Commercial Exam Pools

Simon — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:33:20 +0000

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Current pools are now available for the Elements 1,3,8 and 9, the old outdated pools have been removed.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.

HAM radio to Digital Project – Pakistan Flood Relief

Simon — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:58:55 +0000

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.

[Posted on behalf of Jeannie Stamberger and the Crisis Commons]

HAM Radios can get information in and out when most other communication infrastructure is down. This project will develop technology to allow HAM radio generated information to be directly posted to Twitter, Facebook, or as an RSS feed to output information in a flexible data format (e.g., ‘Tweak the Tweet’ model) to provide digital machine-parsable information for direct input into information dissemination tools, such as Ushahidi and Sahana maps, Facebook posts and other tools under development.

Needs. Based on the information I am able to get, we need tools for (not in order):

* HAM Radio to Facebook
* HAM Radio to RSS
* HAM Radio to Twitter

Technical requirements are being gathered at http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/HAM_Radio_to_Digital. Please get the word out to HAM and digital data stream folks to that area – we need a group effort to clarify technical needs.

Please get out the message that a working group will be set up for the CrisisCampSiliconValley – Pakistan Floods this Friday August 27, 5pm-10pm Carnegie Mellon, NASA Ames Research Center (http://ccsv-pkfloods.eventbrite.com/) to develop a HAM Radio to digital system for use in Pakistan.

Extra exam question glitches fixed

Simon — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:30:19 +0000

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

Morse Code file format changed

Simon — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:07:53 +0000

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.

Mp3 is a compressed format so the files are much smaller and also mp3 is a far more friendly for modern browsers and of course will now work with our favorite mp3 players. In the short term I am using a flash mp3 player embedded in the web page to allow you to play the files directly from the page. Please leave me a comment if you have problems with this. I’m also going to be improving the look of the web pages as they haven’t changed in ages and are certainly showing their age, particularly now I’ve upgraded the rest of the site.

Morse Code Podcast? – In the longer term I’d like to try and set something up for a daily morse podcast so that you can get a new QSO or perhaps some other content as morse code via iTunes or a similar podcast feed service. I think all the bits are in place at this point, I’ll just have to find some time to code it up. If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know.

Cheers,

Simon, AA9PW

New Extra class ham radio license question pool online at AA9PW.com

Simon — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:50:07 +0000

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

Finally a new look!

Simon — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:50:36 +0000

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.

At the same time as changing the site’s organization I’ve also moved web hosting companies. This will probably result in some weirdness sooner or later but hopefully everything still works as before. If you have any thoughts on the new layout or notice any bugs, please let me know.

Now its far easier to add content than it was before with good old Dreamweaver I will endeavor to add new content and keep things more up to date. I probably need to get myself up to date first – Ham radio is moving very fast in this internet era and I’m pretty certain I am way behind the curve. Ahh well, it will give me something to do in my spare time!

Cheers! Simon, AA9PW