Call me GENERAL N1USD !!!!!

Ben Cartwright SASS

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I have had my ticket for 25 years but have only had a radio for the last month and made my first QSO a month ago, I knew I would go crazy with gear if I used it.

Well a month ago a friend talked me into a Baefung HP8 HT and within days I bought a Yaesu FT-2980 and Diamond X30, feel in love! then a week later updated to the Diamond X50 and routinely work the Paxton repeater 40 miles away at 30 watts.

two weeks ago I decided to study for my General ticket and used Hamtestonline.com and this past week W,T,Fri, I did over 70 practice tests until my eyes crossed.

Took the test in Braintree Saturday and ACED IT!! So I am now a General!! They let me try the Extra Exam, tried it with no studying guessing at most everything and got 17 out of 50.

I may this summer or fall start studying for the extra (told you I would go overboard)

To celebrate I ordered a KENWOOD TS-590SG !!!

now I need to get an antenna but the XYL doesn't want an antenna farm, I think she might go for a multi band vertical on the shed out back but will have to bury the coax like I did 25 years ago with the CB base.

N1USD JEFF

here is my current shack, waiting on the Kenwood
 

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Congrats. Nice setup.

I'm hoping to study for my Extra later this year. I plan on getting a wire up for HF after having some trees removed. Still unsure where/how I'm going to put up my Diamond X50A for VHF/UHF. I won't mount anything to the house and no towers, so perhaps standing it off a tree or on a push-up?
 
Congrats. Nice setup.

I'm hoping to study for my Extra later this year. I plan on getting a wire up for HF after having some trees removed. Still unsure where/how I'm going to put up my Diamond X50A for VHF/UHF. I won't mount anything to the house and no towers, so perhaps standing it off a tree or on a push-up?
One of my 2M antennas is a 15 ft 3 element co-linear verticle. I just clamped it to an 8 ft mast and then clamped the mast to the stink pipe where it goes out thru the roof. Easy. Let the house be your tower. If your stink pipe is PVC, you might think about a ground to somewhere. Jack.
 
Congrats on General. It's so much more than Technician.

I took an Extra test recently with 0 studying to see how I'd do. I think I got about a 50, but to be fair I should have not taken wild guesses which may have skewed my score upwards. I bought the ARRL book and am slowly working my way through it. The answers are much more obvious so far. If I'm being honest with myself, I want Extra because I want to be superior to lowly Generals. At the moment I don't care so much about the extra bandwidth, but I'd like to not worry about those band gaps where you know someone is operating at 7175 but you can't talk to them.

The carrot I'm dangling is a new base station. But there's no sense in a nice base station without a proper antenna...
 
Congrats. Nice setup.

I'm hoping to study for my Extra later this year. I plan on getting a wire up for HF after having some trees removed. Still unsure where/how I'm going to put up my Diamond X50A for VHF/UHF. I won't mount anything to the house and no towers, so perhaps standing it off a tree or on a push-up?

My wife wouldn't let me put up a weather station on our 2nd floor deck until I did it with PVC, they are worried about lightning, my X50 is "fiberglass" so they don't mind.. I think I will be able to put a vertical on the shed where I used to have a 18 foot ham stick, but will have to bury the coax as she doesn't want coax running all around the yard
 
I have had my ticket for 25 years but have only had a radio for the last month and made my first QSO a month ago, I knew I would go crazy with gear if I used it.

Well a month ago a friend talked me into a Baefung HP8 HT and within days I bought a Yaesu FT-2980 and Diamond X30, feel in love! then a week later updated to the Diamond X50 and routinely work the Paxton repeater 40 miles away at 30 watts.

two weeks ago I decided to study for my General ticket and used Hamtestonline.com and this past week W,T,Fri, I did over 70 practice tests until my eyes crossed.

Took the test in Braintree Saturday and ACED IT!! So I am now a General!! They let me try the Extra Exam, tried it with no studying guessing at most everything and got 17 out of 50.

I may this summer or fall start studying for the extra (told you I would go overboard)

To celebrate I ordered a KENWOOD TS-590SG !!!

now I need to get an antenna but the XYL doesn't want an antenna farm, I think she might go for a multi band vertical on the shed out back but will have to bury the coax like I did 25 years ago with the CB base.

N1USD JEFF

here is my current shack, waiting on the Kenwood
Congrats! I remember those heady days when I got my General (1985 in Boston)...I haven't touched my Morse key since :confused:. I bought the same HF radio you have on order. I love it. I couldn't make my mind up between that and the IC-7300 but I'm glad when I cut the cards, they came up with the Kenwood. It's a great radio and has a great front end. The DSP is great and there are a few programs that Kenwood has that you can use to configure the radio the way you like...RX and TX audio EQ for example, and many others.
 
I just got home from taking the Extra exam. I probably could have passed it months ago but I wanted to learn as much as I could and score as high as I could. 50/50, baby! I'm not going to lie, that was a lot of work, but I really learned a lot. And at the end it was just a lot of practice tests and some time going through the question pool to either understand the answer, memorize the answer, or figure out a trick to remember the answer.

When I first decided to upgrade I dangled a new rig out as a carrot, but then I bought that while you could still buy electronics. So then I dangled a new antenna as a carrot, but bought that so I could have it up and tuned before it got cold out. So now I need a new carrot. I'm going to start learning CW, so maybe something related to that. I already bought a little tiny one frequency CW only transceiver kit that I need to assemble, so that should keep me busy.

Anyway, I'm glad to have done it. 73s.

ToddDubya/AE
 
Congratulations!!! I have to start studying for extra again
I missed a local test by one day and had to just keep doing practice tests for a month until the next nearby-ish test. I didn't want to forget anything before I could take the test. I also wanted to do the best I could because that's how I am.

I used the ARRL study guide, which was decent. Some areas I would have liked more info, and other areas less, but it was teaching to the test and I get that. But there are other books out there that people seem to like better. I just figured ARRL is the VEC, so their book is probably good to go.
 
This site was pretty helpful with the flash cards, and their tests are good:


And this one:


I did a lot of tests and maybe it was just my impression, but there were some questions that seemed to come up too often, and others I rarely got. That's something to look out for.

Something else I found helpful was to look at the questions for a given element and see what they asked and what they didn't. There's a lot of stuff I found I didn't need to focus on because there weren't any questions or the questions were asked in a way that it was easier to remember the answers. At first I thought of this as cheating, but I see it more as not getting tripped up by the questions.
 
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