Upgrade now......"dont say nothin, juss do it!"

[The Slab Bacon]

Some years ago, I never really thought it would be worth the bother to upgrade to extra. As an AMer and ragchewer I just didnt feel that it would give me any privelidges that I would actually use or find to be worth the effort.

With the new "phone band expansion" a few years back, a lot of my buddies were going "down band" and I couldnt join them. this had kinda raised an eyebrow and was making me start to think real hard about it.

Finally the YL wanted to get a ticket (she's now a general). I took her to a small local club's testing session to take her technician test. Only 4 people showed up that day for testing, and they were desperate to give tests to anyone that would take one. (club fundraiser) So I said "What the hell, give me the extra test". And passed it with no problem.

So........................If I can walk in and pass it cold without studying at all, ANYONE else here should be able to pass it without much more than a little bit of studying and / or research. Anyone who's done a moderate amount homebrewing or repair work should be able to pass it without any problems. (I'm surely no rocket scientist)

With 3600-3800 a vast expanse of empty space it adds a new dimension to the pleasure of operating, and is now well worth the effort of upgrading.

So, once again in the immortal words of Bill Mckinney: "Dont say nuttin, juss do it!"     You will be more than glad you did.

                                                             the Slab Bacon

[KB2WIG]

..........  and it improves one's smugness factor



klc

[WD8BIL]

Hey...... i ain't smug you worthless pleeb!

[W2PFY]

Yo Frank or anyone else, did you ever take any of those on line Extra practice tests? Are they any good? Do the tests reflect what would be on a real test? And finally, if anyone has used them as an exercise, which would you recommend?

[W3GMS]

Congratulations Frank!  See you on 3.690 
Joe, W3GMS 

[WD8BIL]

Terry, the practice tests on QRZ have the actual questions contained in the 300 question test pool. You do good on those and you'll be OK FB!

[The Slab Bacon]

Congratulations Frank!  See you on 3.690 
Joe, W3GMS 

Joe,
      Where have you been?? I did it 3 or 4 years ago.  

Yo Frank or anyone else, did you ever take any of those on line Extra practice tests? Are they any good? Do the tests reflect what would be on a real test? And finally, if anyone has used them as an exercise, which would you recommend?

Terry,
         I would think all of them should be OK. The questions have to come from the official question pool. My wife used QRZ's tests for her tech and general.

[K1JJ]

Terry,

I remember being at a ham friend's house after encouraging him to go after the Extra. He was going thru the Extra questions on line. He could answer each one in less than a second. He got used to the answers and positioning. It took me a full minute to read and answer each one in comparison.

Many of the tech questions he could not even understand, but knew the answers. He aced the test later on.

Bottom line is, the human brain is very good at pattern recognition. Take the practice tests and after a week even a 6 year old could pass the Extra.

There's no reason why ALL hams should not have their Extra class ticket after a year in the hobby. Why let the bastards treat us like second class citizens by telling us we can't operate here or there like the Extras can? Screw that. Get the Extra and be done with it. Operate with full privies for the rest of our lives.

It's the old saying, paraphrased: It's not how hard the test was or what we learned to get it. What really counts is what we DO afterwards over our next 50 odd years of ham radio.

T

[K5UJ]

Take the practice tests and after a week even a 6 year old could pass the Extra.

I know of Advanced and Generals who got licensed back when the test required doing things like drawing schematics.  They refuse to upgrade now, especially with the elimination of the cw test.  On one hand I am sad that they deny themselves all the wonderful frequency space but I can sort of see their point of view re the current state of American license testing.   And no, I did not take the essay test, I took the multiple guess tests in the 1970s.   But anyway Terry and others, you may as well take the test and get the expanded phone frequencies.

[k4kyv]

I took my Extra, cold, before the FCC examiner in 1963.  Of course, that one included the 20 wpm CW test.  Passed both it and my 1st Class Commercial the same day, and received the tickets in the mail the same day exactly one month later.

The only studying I did was during the 1-hour drive down to the exam site.  My buddy had a Q-A manual for the First Phone and I memorised some of the off-the-wall stuff like what was the FM deviation for the audio portion of a TV signal.  But I had been building transmitters and "hot-rodding" receivers for quite a while longer than the 4 years I had been licensed as a ham.  Just as now, I worked mostly AM phone, but occasionally would slip down lower in the band and work a few CW contacts.  Still, I was amazed that I managed to pass the 20 wpm code test, which I am sure just I squeaked by with the bare minimum number of characters required for one minute of perfect copy.

So, when Incentive Licensing was being debated about the same time, I, somewhat smugly, felt that the debate was of no interest to me, since I already had full privileges and would not be affected.  But the problem was, many of the hams I worked regularly on AM were affected and all told, I quickly realised that I liked ham radio better the way it was before the bands were carved up into sub-bands and sub-sub-bands.

Some things I noticed was that after I.L. went into effect, (1) it became very crowded in the General class phone bands, (2) almost immediately, AM all but disappeared from the bands (3) the Extra Class sub-bands, both phone and CW, became very sparsely populated and (4) within a short while most of the home-brew transmitters, both phone and CW, disappeared off the air.

So I felt that Incentive Licensing was a dismal failure in terms of its stated goals and purpose: to improve the technical expertise of the amateur radio community.  Just compare the technical content of QST or any of the other ham radio rags pre-Incentive Licensing to what we see to-day.

I believe the reason AM all but disappeared was the fact that the vast majority of AM'ers at that time had only the General class licence, and the phone bands became so congested that most just threw in the sponge and bought a slopbucket appliance, and many hauled their old homebrew AM rigs to the landfill. The newly-reactivated Advanced class exam, although it included no CW test, was not exactly a trivial challenge and for most people required a lot of study.

[WD8BIL]

They refuse to upgrade now, especially with the elimination of the cw test.

Well ifn you can't cw I don't wanna talk to ya anyway

[KA1ZGC]

Amazing how many of you can read other people's minds, divine their reasoning, and speak with such authority on their motives for upgrading or not upgrading.

I'll tell you why I haven't upgraded:

• I have a life outside ham radio. About 99.75% of it, actually.
• My license grants me privilege to all the spectrum I'm currently interested in.
• I don't feel at all "restricted", "imprisoned", or "boxed in" by my Advanced license.
• I have yet to hear a single thing below 3700 (or in any Extra-only portions of any HF band) that made me wish I had my Extra so I could join in.
• Last, but not least, it's my license.

This is one of those threads that gets regurgitated several times a year, and it almost always starts with "I've been hanging out on extra frequency x, but there's nobody there to talk to me, so you all need to upgrade and come hang out on my new pet frequency, because it's an oasis for amateur radio".

Seriously, if you guys are so upset by my current license status, you really don't have enough to do with your time. Of course, the truth is that none of you actually care about my privileges or my restrictions, this whole thread is just one giant "HEY, LOOK AT ME, I GOT ME AN EXTRA CLASS LICENSE, AND YOU DON'T!!".

Talk about Flex users. Sheesh. You guys really need to lighten up.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Extra - a spare or leftover copy of something

And, do you notice how often other amateur license classes toot their horn in your face about their license class 

[W1RKW]

Tom/JJ brought this challenge back at the end of '06.

http://amfone.net/Amforum/index.php?topic=8985.0

I took his challenge. It wasn't much of a challenge considering it was an easy test because of relaxation but I went to Extra from Advanced.  I do remember the Advanced being fairly difficult back in the mid 80's. Todays Extra test was snap just as Frank described. Do the QRZ practice tests and memorize the patterns and it's a shoe in. If you want to do it, that is.

The few times I tried to upgrade to Extra (way back when cw was a required) I choked every time at the 20wpm test.  Now there's no need to worry about it, ever.   And I still do CW but at my speed. 

There's nothing to prove to anyone.

[Jim KF2SY]

Amazing how many of you can read other people's minds, divine their reasoning, and speak with such authority on their motives for upgrading or not upgrading.

I'll tell you why I haven't upgraded:

• I have a life outside ham radio. About 99.75% of it, actually.
• My license grants me privilege to all the spectrum I'm currently interested in.
• I don't feel at all "restricted", "imprisoned", or "boxed in" by my Advanced license.
• I have yet to hear a single thing below 3700 (or in any Extra-only portions of any HF band) that made me wish I had my Extra so I could join in.
• Last, but not least, it's my license.

This is one of those threads that gets regurgitated several times a year, and it almost always starts with "I've been hanging out on extra frequency x, but there's nobody there to talk to me, so you all need to upgrade and come hang out on my new pet frequency, because it's an oasis for amateur radio".

Seriously, if you guys are so upset by my current license status, you really don't have enough to do with your time. Of course, the truth is that none of you actually care about my privileges or my restrictions, this whole thread is just one giant "HEY, LOOK AT ME, I GOT ME AN EXTRA CLASS LICENSE, AND YOU DON'T!!".

Talk about Flex users. Sheesh. You guys really need to lighten up.

My 3 cents here: I think Thom nailed it.  Agree 100%.
Furthermore, you can't go out get yer Advanced anymore, it's unobtanium.  It's a living document of Ham Radio History.
When it's gone via an upgrade to "Extra Lite", it's gone forever.  It has all the privledges I'm interested in.  If someone wants to qso to 3690 just to use their extra, bully for them, but I'm holding on to my Advanced ticket.  They will have to pry it from my cold dead clammy hands.   
To those of you who forever gave up their Advanced, naaa--naaa---naaa--na booo boooo. 



        

[W2PFY]

Boy, what a spin this has been from what I thought was a positive post to a bitch session.

So I don't know what the problem is? Ham radio is just something to do. It's nothing more. Pride in a license class is all in ones mind. There is no place in the USA or the world where there is an exclusive club for any class license. You don't see extra's hanging out at Charles's place or Advanced guys saying you better stay out of Texas if in you know what's good for you? You never heard of a Novice class guy hiding behind his mothers skirt? So what's to be excited about? I don't care who has what, I just want to be a five word per minute Extra and I promise if I ever pass the test, I'll tell no one

[ka3zlr]

Lol,, Extra Lite what..? cigarettes....lol.....


73

Jack.

[k4kyv]

Just drop the pretence that the remaining vestiges of Incentive Licensing actually serve a useful purpose.  Take the esoteric stuff out of the Extra class exam so that it's about on par in difficulty with the old General of yesteryear, or else add more stuff to the present General test to make it meaningful. Make the the Technician exam ask questions that reflect the actual privileges granted, including the limited HF privileges. Get rid of everything else, including the published verbatim Q-A pools.  Change the names to reflect the privileges granted, something like Restricted Licence and Full Licence. Be done with it.

I would still have my old Amateur Extra wall certificate that the FeeCee issued to me in 1963, just like I still have my last First Class Radiotelephone wall certificate issued before they downgraded it to that ugly yellow "General Radiotelephone".













 

[KA1ZGC]

Boy, what a spin this has been from what I thought was a positive post to a bitch session.

"I got my Extra, you can too!" is a positive post.

Broadly categorizing everyone who isn't an Extra as stubborn masochists who are merely trying to prove a point is not positive, it's demeaning. It's also wildly inaccurate.

If you want to encourage people to get their Extras, knock yourselves out. Just be aware that talking down about people who aren't Extras (for whatever reason) has the exact opposite of the intended effect, and tends to make the writer come off as elitist when they may not even realize it.

I know pretty much everyone on this thread personally, which is why I'm stating this in broad terms rather than pulling up quotes and naming names; I think the problem here is that some just don't realize how their sentiments can be interpreted as being far more negative than they intended.

For the record, I'm not offended by the stereotype, but I re-iterate that the stereotype doesn't fit me.

Also for the record, I know I'm frequently offensive and judgmental, but I'm usually doing it deliberately. 

We're already surrounded by licensees who hold the stereotype that all AM operators are elitist snobs, so to exhibit a patronizing attitude (albeit unintentional) doesn't help our cause when trying to coexist with other modes without always looking like the aggressors whenever a dispute arises. Let's not prove them right.

Seriously, guys... encourage, but please don't judge. That's counter-productive.

That pretty much sums it up. Thanks for listening, I'm done now.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Thank God! Justifying why you haven't upgraded to those who don't even care is just plain boring.

[KA1ZGC]

How cute.

[K1JJ]

Thom,

The comment I made was meant as a light-hearted effort at dry humor - now you're trying to make it into a federal case. It was not intended to be offensive.  
Our intentions, as always, were to encourage excellence in rig building, and especially upgrading.  I'm not sure why certain Advanced class hams have such a bug up their asse about others upgrading, but you're right - we don't care if you do or don't. We are looking for guys on the fence who are considering it. Your's and Pete's comments don't help the cause at all.

Since it seems to bother some, I've deleted my post.

We're still looking for positive comments from guys who plan to upgrade before this thread works itself out.

73,

T

[WA1GFZ]

I just hope to upgrade to better audio

[KF1Z]

Funny thread...gotta love it.

It's fun to see the comments back and forth...

Not to long ago there were threads about how useless and unimportant an extra class license is,,, now that you don't have to do anything for it.

carry on......

 

[KX5JT]

I wanna upgrade to better power and antennas!