Oh, Phil, that's funny about your friend getting so nervous and the guy 
wondering why he couldn't hear any code through his headphones.

I lost my original Novice call because I was so nervous taking the General 
that I failed the written part.

I remember when I went to the FCC to take my advanced and Extra, since I had a 
conditional I had to re-take that to become a General on the way.  This was 
ten years after I'd gotten my license.

It was either in the General which was a Brailled exam, without the diagrams, 
or in the Advanced, which my dad read to me, when we came to the diagram 
section.

An assistant Engineer from the FCC came in and started describing the diagram. 
He said "we have a PNP transistor with the base connected to a voltage source, 
and the collector  to a coil and capacitor."  I knew it was an oscillator 
circuit.

But, when he got to the third question on the diagram he literally said: "Oh, 
shit!  I gave you that answer already."

The question was:  What type of transistor is this?  To at least show him I 
knew, I asked if the arrows pointed toward or away from the base.

Steve, K8SP

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Scovell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2008 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: Most Memorable Ham Experiences


Meagan,

Your story reminded me of a friend of mine, long passed away now for many
years, and he was an electronics genius.  I was 14 at the time I met him on
the air.  He worked for Western Electric in Omaha managing computers as they
stretched copper wire into miles and miles.  No fooling.  His job was to
keep the computers, at either end, working at precision speed so the wire
wouldn't break.  He was in his forties when we worked as novices on 80
meters and soon became personal friends, going to World Radio In Council
Bluffs together, and he put up my first tri band beam for me when we became
generals.  Anyhow, we called him Tex but that wasn't his real name.  I found
out that when Tex went to take his general test, this was when the FCC came
to Omaha to give the exams once every three months, he was so nervous, he
flunked the code test the first time.  The next time he tried, he kept
breaking the led in his pencil, pulled his headphone plug out of the jack of
the recorder, and about had a heart attack.  I think he took it three times
before passing.  I know a man who took the general test 13 times before
finally passing the written test.  When I went to take my general exam, I
was last in line and two groups of guys, about a dozen in each group, put on
headphones and took the code test.  The FCC examiner turned it up so loud, I
could almost copy every letter sitting across the room.  In the first group,
before the tape was turned on, a guy yelled out, "Hey, I can't hear anything
coming through my headphones."  The examiner calmly said, "That's because I
haven't turned the tape machine on yet."

Phil.
K0NX