Passed the Technician-class amateur radio exam. Call sign: KJ5JQC.
Three reasons this was worth an evening of studying FCC part 97:
- Legality. The drone and antenna projects keep brushing against transmit power and frequency allocation questions. Better to know the rules than to guess at them.
- Privileges. Technician opens up frequency bands and power levels that matter for long-range telemetry experiments.
- People. The amateur radio community is full of engineers who have been doing practical RF for decades. That’s a mentorship pool you can’t buy.
General and Extra are on the list for HF privileges — long-range communication is where the interesting propagation problems live.