[FTA]

I've been a Technician for many years. I have worked numerous local responses: parades, athletic events, smaller scale weather disasters. It was really rewarding, especially when a family member was actually participating in the event, and you felt awesome knowing you're keeping watch and helping to direct and dispatch help where needed. I met a lot of folks who were much older and had amazing stories. One in particular drove his RV with his wife down to LA shortly after Katrina and, using a ham radio and bag phone, helped relay a lot of the communications flowing out of the area.

Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M. This unfortunately kept me from ever upgrading and being of use in large scale disasters like this. I can understand to an extent why the licensing is still required; otherwise you will have these spectra flooded with people probably using them for commercial purposes with no regulation to cut them off.

Basic ham communications are still absolutely critical in major disasters. A few others have touched on this, but bandwidth and throughout for communication is increased with the advent of digital interfaces to the radios to the point that you can essentially establish a data connection over the air. Godspeed to those who make the trek.

[lutorm]

I went to get my U.S. Technician license (I've had a Swedish CEPT2 license for a long time but never been very active) after studying a bit online, and after passing that they asked if I wanted to try the General test too, since I was already there. I did, and I passed. (Did the same with Extra, but didn't pass that one.)

I would certainly not be comfortable with actually operating a HF rig without doing some prep work, but it seems to me that an active ham would have a reasonable chance of squeezing by the General test if they gave it a chance.

[mmaunder]

I would say technician to general isn't such a big leap. Extra felt like it was a big leap - targeted at electrical engineers. I did all 3 in one day - was trying to prove something to myself I guess. If you're technical and are interested in the subject it'll just take you a few hours to get general and HF so so much fun!!

[tzs]

> Unfortunately the bar to get a General license is much higher than Technician, even without the Morse Code. There are a ton of regulations and rules you need to be familiar with that are often not related to E&M.

I suspect you are underestimating your abilities and/or overestimating the difficulty of the test. The test is very structured and you can take advantage of that.

If you are good on the E&M stuff, you can blow a lot of the regulation questions. The tests consist of questions drawn from 10 categories. Here's the breakdown for Technician (T), General (G), and Extra (E):

  T   G   G   E
  6   5   5   6   Commission's Rules
  3   5   5   5   Operating Procedures
  3   3   3   3   Radio Wave Propagation
  2   5   5   5   Amateur Radio Practices
  4   3   3   4   Electrical Principles
  4   3   2   6   Circuit Components
  4   3   3   8   Practical Circuits
  4   2   3   4   Signals and Emissions
  2   4   4   8   Antennas and Feed Lines
  3   2   2   1   Electrical and RF Safety

(General is listed twice because I made that table just a couple months before the General test was due to be updated, and I now don't remember which column was for which revision. Extra was revised last year so the counts may be off for that too).

For Technician and General you have to get 26 out of 35 to pass. For Extra it is 37 out of 50.

So, for general, you get to blow 9 questions. Even if you miss everything in the rules questions, that's only 5 out of your budget of 9.

Furthermore, the questions in the pool for each category are further divided into several groups. You get exactly one question from each group. The 5 groups in the rules category on the General exam are:

• General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations

• Antenna structure limitations; good engineering and good amateur practice; beacon operation; prohibited transmissions; retransmitting radio signals

• Transmitter power regulations; data emission standards

• Volunteer Examiners and Volunteer Examiner Coordinators; temporary identification

• Control categories; repeater regulations; harmful interference; third party rules; ITU regions; automatically controlled digital station

You can almost certainly pick one or two of those groups and learn enough to answer the questions for those groups without much trouble. For example if you can just memorize the lower and upper frequencies of the major HF bands you'll known enough to answer the majority of questions in the "General Class control operator frequency privileges; primary and secondary allocations" group.

If you haven't actually given General a try, I'd recommend going to hamexam.org and/or hamstudy.org, and doing some practice tests. You can also review the entire question pool. I bet you'll find that in a weekend or two of practice in your spare time you'll find you are passing with reasonable frequency, and with a little more time you'll get to the point where you pass enough to be confident in taking the actual test.

If you make an account at those sites they will keep track of stats, and at least one of them, I believe, will give you stats by category and group so you can figure out what areas to concentrate on.

[dlgeek]

They got rid of the morse requirement for General years ago.