On Saturday, 17 Oct 2015, we minted three new Amateur Extra class licensees, all the way from the ground up, for our son Morgan (age 20), daughter Jess (13) and me (Waifu will follow along shortly). That’s right, three simultaneous triple plays: Technician, General and Amateur Extra tests passed in a single session for three people at one time. We followed a process we developed for homeschooling our children (brick-and-mortar ABET accredited Electrical Engineering degree earned at age 19 for our son, and nine college credit hours in history earned at age 11 for our daughter). I believe this process is repeatable, and can achieve similar results, regardless of your particular background.
The entire amateur radio licensing swath includes Technician, General and Amateur Extra class licenses, in order. I leave it to other sources to explain all these in detail (example:ARRL’s website), but to those interested in militia or community protection teams, I think everyone, no matter what their intended role, should at least get the Technician class license and start practicing for base defense or emergency center operations. This level is the communication equivalent of having a personal weapon and being able to punch holes in paper with it. The next step up, the General class license, should be the default standard, and is the communication equivalent of being able to operate in a team, even if only to lay down a base of fire, to help in a triage operation, or work in an operations center. Another advantage of a General license is that it lets three of your adult General licensees become Volunteer Examiners (VEs), and begin testing and qualifying new Technician licensees.
The Amateur Extra class license adds a few features in some bands, but to me the major advantage of this class of license is that now your VEs can test and qualify new licensees at any level, including Amateur Extra. This will greatly decouple your growing team from needing to depend on others for testing. It will also allow you to help the VEs who tested you by making it easier to schedule tests and to handle when one of the VEs comes down sick. Everyone benefits from adding more Amateur Extra VEs to the mix. As a result, any sizeable group should hold itself accountable for getting three Amateur Extra VEs in place, and then start offering at least the Technician class tests at every training session. I think you should also deliberately cross-deck VEs across groups and regions, if for no other reason than to build larger coordination networks and esprit de corps, making sure that your test sessions also borrow at least one VE from elsewhere. Morgan and I will be starting the VE certification process ASAP, and then we will be available on demand wherever and whenever practical.
Our total investment of time for this result was about three and one-half weeks, starting from literally zero, outside our engineering degrees, which were helpful but not sufficient nor required. My original intention was to get us all licensed at the Technician level, and then build up from there, possibly tossing myself and Morgan across the General level at the first test session if practical. So, in the last week of September, we ordered two study guides, one for the Technician class and one for the General class.
h/t WRSA
