Copasetic Flow

The 12 year-old unschooling kid here has been soldering since she was eight. She'll be taking her ham exam soon. (She's also contributing to the development of the ham practice exam app she's using. That's how we've been working on programming.) So, with all this ham radio work going on, it only made sense to ask if she'd like to help build an amp that will hopefully help the Rockmite get a little further out. So far things are working out great! She soldered the first third or so including most (all?) of the resistors last night. I got up this morning and soldered in most of the capacitors and the Zener diode. We'll be up and running in no time! Anyways: There are also ideas for suspending the Rockmite and the Tuna Topper in the antenna: There might even bee a second can of tuna for the batteries!

I thought publishing the amateur radio general class license exam question pool on Datasette would get the kid and I writing (videoing in this case) help topics for the exam pretty quickly. Sure enough, a little over 36 hours later we released our first video. The kid asked what vdc was while she was studying this morning. I responded that I had no idea. (Turned out she hadn't pronounced dc like they were the sub script characters they are.) Rather than squinting at the practice app on the kid's phone, I clicked over to our Datasette instance and searched for questions with vdc and voila! A quick conversation about the dc power formula later, the kids and I were making the video above. Anyways: This isn't the kid's first appearance on ham radio videos. This This will also lead to using generative AI to create search rerences in the future.

Well, that was easy. In my previous post, I wondered about being able to publish the ham radio general class license exam question pool so that anyone could explore it using Datasette . There's a CLI command for that. Put simply, if you're already running things on Google Cloud (like a ham radio practice exam ), then you can issue a single command: datasette publish cloudrun mydatabase.db --service=my-database But, if you're running on windows... ahem... you'll also need to get rid of the tmp file cleanup routine because it'll hose up the entire process, preventing you from deploying at all. Fortunately, the fix is pretty simple once you've located the file it lives in. So, here's the general class question pool ! Explore away.

The twelve year old here is routinely passing practice exams for the United States amateur radio technician class license. Consequently, she and I started to work on updating our practice exam app to the latest general class question pool . We wrapped up the new deployment of the app earlier this afternoon, and I just wrote a python script to dump the question pool into a sqlite3 database. With the question pool all databased up, my next fun project was to study the questions in Simon Willison's datasette app . This allowed me to find out a few interesting things about the question pool right away. As an example, supposing you were to just go in to the test without studying and guess answers? Is there an answer you'd be better off leaning towards? A facet of the question pool based on the correct answer, (A, B, C, or D), indicates that no guessed answer is particularly better than any other: I suppose you'd get a tiny bias guessing either 'B' or 'C', bu...

The 12 year-old here, aka Daize in these pages, and I have been teaching ourselves Datasette, a Python based tool for exploring data sets. We came across the tool the first time as members of the San Francisco Microscopical Society when we attended a meeting about their historical papers database. Datasette , a tool created by Simon Willison is being used to serve their historical document database . It looked like a nice tool to know, but I didn't have an immediate use for it until last week when I got a little bit of bandwidth to setup new help page links for the ham radio practice exam app . I rooted around in the Google App Engine dataset pages a bit, then I played with making pages as templates in the Django based app, (did I mention that Simon was also one of the creators of Django?), and then it occurred to me that Datasette might be the most useful way of inspecting and modifying the help page links. In any event, the kid and I would be learning something new. The short ve...

 I released a new version of the ham radio exams practice app featuring the new FCC Technician class pool questions this week. The code's greatly simplified from the 'do everything older app. The biggest visible change is that the only login mode remaining is the simple one that accepts your username and password over an unsecured form not attached to any other social services. Login is only useful for tracking your scores and which questions you've practiced as shown below. Before I get into other details, you can find the site at  https://hamdaise.wl.r.appspot.com/hamtest and the repository at  https://github.com/hcarter333/ham-radio-freedom . So, handy, but don't use any passwords or usernames for that matter that need to stay secure. This just isn't that sort of program :) I'm slowly but surely getting the ham radio help topics lined up back up with the questions. I did the first dozen or so today . There are over 400 questions though, so this part will t...

You can sign-in to save your scores and customize ham radio practice exams at copaseticflows using your Google account! Look for more ways to interact with your Google and Facebook friends coming soon. Is there anything you'd like to see? Leave a suggestion in the comments section below.

The Copasetic Flow Amateur Radio General and Extra Class Practice Exams are now available as an embeddable Google gadgeta! The gadgeta shown below can be placed on your igoogle homepage, or any other web page to provide your readers with a quick practice exam. The exam gadget also works great on your igoogle page on your iPhone! You can install these gadgets on your own iGoogle home page, or on any web page by using these links General Class and Extra Class .

If you're interested in becoming a ham radio operator and you're going to be in the Silicon Valley area on January 24th, you should check out the Ham Radio Training and Testing in a Day sponsored by South County Amateur Radio Emergency Services . It sounds like a fun event and chances are you can walk out at the end of the day with your Tech ticket! The event will be held in Los Altos, CA which is a beautiful little city in it's own right. Bring your friends, and family. If they don't want to attend class with you, they'll love Los Altos anyway!

Practice the Industry Canada Basic Qualification Ham Radio Exam. Study materials are linked to most questions, or add your own using the form below! Login to save and review previous test results: Name: Password: Basic Qualification Practice Exam Loading... Loadi...

Go take a practice test now using the links below! Technician General Extra Read the review of the Copasetic Flow Ham Radio Practice Tests at kb6nu.com The next time you practice a ham radio licensing exam here, you'll notice that the interface has changed a little bit to add a few new features. Focused Practice on Subelements Taking practice exams that simulate the randomly selected exams used for license tests is one of the best ways to study. But, sometimes, there's just one section of the test that is giving you the most trouble. Now, when you click the 'Practice Subelements' button, a control panel will appear that allows you to restrict your study to a single test subelement. When you click on the button for a subelement you will only be presented questions from that subelement. The button for the subelement you've selected will be highlighted with a different colored background. After you've studied the subelements you wanted to focus on, just click ...

Go take a practice test now using the links below! Technician General Extra Now, when you practice for your amateur radio, (ham), exams you can track your progress and find out which test subelements you need to spend the most time on. Just create a user name using the login box: The user name is used to track your test scores. After you have practiced a test, you should see results similar to those shown below. The first chart shows all of your test scores. The second chart shows how you're doing on each test subelement. Use the second chart and the table below to determine which subelements to spend your time studying. Coming soon: practice tests focused on specific subelements. 73 and have fun! KD0FNR

The amateur radio license exam practice applications on this site offer two features. First, they provide practice exams randomly constructed from the actual examination question pools. Second, as each exam question is displayed, study materials related to the question are displayed as well. The practice exams can be found at: Technician Class Exam General Class Exam Extra Class Exam Exam Practice Instructions The exam practice screen is shown above. A question is presented along with four multiple choice answers. A correct answer will be highlighted in green. If the wrong answer is selected, it will be highlighted in red. Additional answers can be selected to determine the correct answer, but only the first selected answer will count in the test score. If exam question requires a figure, it will be shown below the multiple choice answers. Study Material Instructions As each question is displayed, related study material may be displayed in the 'Available Study Material secti...

Writing about physics and specifically electromagnetism got me to thinking about amateur radio. In the United States, any person can receive an amateur radio license that allows them to transmit and receive on a number of frequencies allocated by the FCC. Amateur radio is a great hobby. People involved in the hobby, (called amateur radio operators), get a chance to turn their EM knowledge into concrete experience by building usable radio transceivers and antenna structures. To get a license, operators must first pass a written test on radio operations fundamentals, engineering, and FCC regulations that apply to amateur radio. The question pools used for the exam are available online as are practice tests. I thought it would be fun to build an application that would construct practice tests on this blog. The final application will provide practice tests similar to the ones at qrz.com but, with a bit more interactivity. This series of articles will cover the construction of t...