CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@ai6yr @msbellows @sarae @ChuckMcManis @rombat Ultra-High Molecular Weight PolyEthylene, the generic name for spectra or dyneema.

@msbellows @sarae @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat I have no idea, I haven't fished since I was so young I didn't need a license! That's been a long time.

Thinking about this, actually it gets worse, I use UHMWPE braided fishing line as my throw line for my lightweight QRP rig.

@sarae @msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat Speaking of getting stuck in the weeds, you should see my QRP EDC throw weight for putting a wire in a tree:

Amazon.com

(www.amazon.com)

Activating POTA QRP by trying to hunt P2P QRP is so much like fishing that maybe I really should have a fishing license!

@msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat I apologize, but only a little bit, for the youtube rabbit fishing hole you are about to find yourself in.

@msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat You may know this, but since plenty of hams don't yet, I'll "be that guy" with some trepidation...

Tenkara fishing poles have no ferrules, just a fixed line, and the carbon fiber push-up masts we have generally are rebranded tenkara poles. I own two SOTA-6 masts, and they have exactly the same tie at the end as the much larger poles that I bought branded as fishing poles. (The POTA33H might be an exception to this rule, and that might be related to it being significantly more expensive — fewer economies of scale...)

I've "taken the bait" and talked enthusiastically to the ranger for 30 minutes about ham radio and POTA and how it is getting more people out into the parks to use, enjoy, and celebrate them. Though, so far, not about a fishing license. Just "I may have to ask you to leave," and so far successfully...

I don't understand why people respond to me on bluesky (thanks to my allowing myself to be federated to bluesky), when they don't allow themselves to be federated from bluesky out to the Fediverse. How do they think I'm going to respond to them?

Almost every recent example has been a #HamRadio post, so — if you see this and have been wondering why I didn't respond to you, please allow yourself to be federated to the fediverse. I'm not joining the bluesky walled garden. I had enough of Big Social Media on Twitter and Google+ and I'm kind of done with that.

@VE7WYC Petition to change the date of celebration to Alfred Vail's birthday, since he was the one with the idea that you could send letters themselves instead of just numbers referencing a code book as Samuel Morse intended?

Or Friedrich Gerke's birthday, since the code we use today is more his invention, and doesn't have both short and long dashes, enabling the proverbial ham-fisted operators to still be understood sometimes?

Community

If you aren't part of a local #HamRadio club. consider joining. My local club is the largest reason I'm an active, learning ham. Without them, I'd probably be an occasional operator and not be picking up much expertise. This Fediverse community is great too! But if you have friendly face-to-face "Elmers" I think it's really worth learning from them.

So pick some resources, and then fearlessly bring here or to your local club (or both!) whatever challenges you find. Confusing explanations, or just needing more breadcrumbs to learn a new topic. Pretty much everyone will have some part of some of the study that is challenging, and it's not an intelligence test. By way of example, my wife is a math PhD, so the math bits were not challenging for her. But she had never played with electronics, so we spent hours going over semiconductors together before she was ready to upgrade to Amateur Extra.

I hope that's useful to you! Good luck and 73 de KZ4LY!

@crazybutable Awesome! I'm definitely in favor of exploring all the resources you have to hand, to see what works for you.

Approach

My first piece of advice is to learn the safety and regulatory topics carefully, and beyond that, pursue a license to learn. Your #HamRadio license isn't graded by how many questions you got wrong. It's pass/fail. The point of this hobby is that there's no end of things to learn; most of the test is just about getting started on that journey. Most of the Volunteer Examiners want you to pass and you'll typically be given the opportunity to try again if you almost pass.

It totally doesn't matter if you miss questions about, say, Winlink or VARA. Not knowing anything about them when you take the test won't kill you, get your license yanked, or make you a bad operator that interferes with other operators. Electrical and RF safety, though, you want to know cold.
(Electrical safety for the General test is unsurprisingly focused primarily on topics relevant to HF operation.)

Don't wait until you get 100% on practice tests. If you consistently get around 85% you have plenty of margin, go sign up!

If you pass a test and they offer you the next level, take it. There is zero penalty for failing, zero shame; it's no different from taking a practice test. And you might just pass.

Resources

For my own #HamRadio license study, I used https://hamstudy.org/ primarily, including contributing to improving some of the explanations for the questions. However, there is no affordance for asking questions if the explanations don't help. So when the explanations didn't help, or didn't help enough, I had to go searching for information; only if I was confident enough in my learning, I improved the explanations for the next person.

I more recently helped Brad KK4PWJ build up the new https://openhamprep.com/ which has a few nice features over hamstudy:

• The explanations for the questions are generally more detailed, are maintained in a Discourse forum to make them easy to edit. If you have a question, you can ask it in the forum by commenting on the explanation, and several folks should get email notifications of your question and help respond. It's intended to be a learning community.
• It was built for accessibility from early days, including keyboard navigation, screen reader support, dyslexic-friendly font support, and light/dark mode support.
• It has topic-based learning resources. These are fleshed out only for Technician so far (Brad, my wife, and I used it to teach a Technician course earlier this year), but the plan is to add them later for General and Amateur Extra. Won't help you on your path to General right now, though.
• The whole app is Open Source.

There are lots of other resources. My wife really appreciated the ARRL study guides for each License level, for instance. She's a mathematician and math educator, so she likes structured learning. Others love @kb6nu's "No Nonsense Guides" that are designed to give you just what you need to pass each level, on the theory that the test is just the first step of learning.