Berryessa CERT members get their Technician Class Amateur Radio Licences.
Berryessa CERT is committed to helping their community in a disaster and so we've been encouraging our members to get their Amateur Radio Technicians licenses. We're proud to announce we now have five licensed Ham radio operators!
The Technician class license is a challenge to say the least. Benicia Amateur Radio Club host a one day "Ham Cram" class to help you study and pass the testing requirements. The class starts at 8:00 am on a Saturday and you study over 400 questions of which you'll be tested on just about 30.
Four of members committed to the October 5th, 2019 class hosted by the Benicia Amateur Radio Club and we all showed up armed with full coffee cups. They give you the questions and answers and you spend hourly increments highlighting the correct answers to each question. After four hours your brain is full to bursting with information!
Benicia Amateur Radio Club recommends that you don't study the material ahead of time as they say their way of "cramming" the questions and answers leads to the best results. Some of our Berryessa CERT members did study for weeks ahead of time, myself included. Others of our group just studied on the day of the class and test.
By the time the test time rolled around in the afternoon, our brains were full and ready to spit out the correct answers to the Technician class test.
The Benicia Amateur Radio Club teachers were very helpful and their test prep system really works. - Joe Sponseller, Berryessa CERT
After we'd all finished the test in silence, we met outside the testing building awaiting our test results. One by one, we were congratulated and told we had passed the exam. We have four new Ham radio operators for our Berryessa CERT team! Combined with one member who had previously taken the same class, we were now up to five members with Technician class Ham radio licenses.
Congratulations to Debbie, Julie, Joe and Shelly for all your hard work! Cynthia, our other Technician class Ham operator can now show us the ropes.