KO6ODW: I Passed My Amateur Radio Technician Exam

For the past several months I've been a strictly receive-only node on the airwaves - decoding FLEX pager signals, pulling down radiosonde telemetry from Oakland's twice-daily balloon launches, scanning mutual-aid traffic, decoding signals that were never addressed to me. Receive, parse, log, repeat. A very comfortable place to live if you like listening more than talking.

This month I decided to flip the duplex.

After about four weeks of grinding through the 2022–2026 Technician question pool - Ohm's law, band plans, the slices of spectrum I'm now allowed to occupy, and the FCC rules that keep us all from stepping on each other - I sat the exam and passed. And not a moment too soon: that question pool is about to be retired and replaced with a fresh one, so I squeaked in on the questions I'd actually been studying instead of having to re-learn a whole new set. The license came through, and I now have a callsign of my very own:

KO6ODW.

So if you're ever spinning the dial and hear a slightly-too-enthusiastic CQ CQ CQ drifting out of downtown San Jose, that's me - finally pressing PTT instead of just turning the squelch down. 73.