Ham College is an amateur radio education and training club in Australia that offers courses to obtain all three license grades. It runs Foundation courses every two months and Standard and Advanced courses annually. Exams are held after each Foundation course. In the last year, Ham College conducted courses for 65 students and 87 exams, with a 91% pass rate. The largest challenges are addressing the needs of rural students through distance education and ensuring new licensees continue their involvement in the hobby after training.
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Education and Training in Amateur Radio (WIA National Conference 2013)
1. Education and Training in
Amateur Radio
WIA Annual Conference 2013
Produced by
Neil Husk - VK6BDO
Doug Bell - VK6DB
HAM COLLEGE
V1.0
24/05/2013
2. Only dedicated amateur radio education and training club in
Australia.
Only amateur radio organisation in Western Australia to train
all three grades of licence.
Formed due to education being the “poor relation” in the
activity of local clubs.
Only a small club with membership open to anyone with an
interest in education and training in amateur radio.
Who is Ham College?
3. Our Training Facilities
Ham College is based in the Lynwood Scout Hall building
(which is in the middle of a public golf course!)
4. Foundation Courses
Ham College runs a Foundation course for one weekend
every two months.
No pre-reading is required, all the material is covered
from scratch during the course.
The course alternates throughout the weekend between
theory slides, practical demonstrations and candidates on
air under supervision.
Each session runs for about 50 minutes, with a 10 minute
break between sessions.
5. Material for our PowerPoint presentation is a
combination of custom-written slides and information
from other sources (with attribution).
Example slides from the Foundation course:
Foundation Courses
6. The College has three amateur callsigns – VK6HC and
VK6PIG are used in training courses by the candidate
and the remote station.
VK6RIB is an information beacon project developed and
operated by the College.
Foundation courses have a limit of 8 candidates,
otherwise it takes too long to run everyone through all
the practical components in the training and the exams.
Exams are run the weekend after the course.
Foundation Courses
7. While Foundation courses are run every two months,
Ham College runs one Standard and one Advanced
course per year.
These courses run for three hours per night, one night
per week, for approximately five months.
The Standard course runs from February to June, then
the Advanced course from July to November.
Ham College has its own training manual that covers
both the Standard and Advanced material.
Advanced syllabus content is highlighted with a box.
Standard / Advanced Courses
8. Example pages from the Standard / Advanced manual:
Standard / Advanced Courses
9. The Standard course includes the Regulations theory.
First hour of the first six weeks is Regulations, then
Standard theory for the remaining two hours.
Once the Regulations material has been studied, the
students sit that exam on a class night. The remainder of
the Standard course is then three hours of theory.
The Advanced course revises all the previous material in
Standard and introduces the new material.
It is primarily designed as an upgrade from Standard but
can be taken alone.
Standard / Advanced Courses
10. For people who can’t commit to attending weekly
classes due to work commitments or because they
aren’t in Perth, Ham College recommends the Radio and
Electronics School in Queensland.
We also make our manuals available if people wish to
self-study.
Our manuals don’t just go to WA students. Over the last
couple of years, we’ve sold manuals to NSW and Qld.
The manuals are designed to cover the entire Standard
and Advanced syllabi and the courses give candidates a
solid background to all the topics.
Standard / Advanced Courses
11. Ham College runs exam sessions every two months, on
the weekend after each Foundation course.
The exam sessions are open to anyone.
It’s not unusual to have 15 candidates at an exam day.
We usually field around 6 assessors at an exam session
which allows us to concurrently run theory exams,
practical demonstrations and on-air contacts.
The Scout hall has a main hall and a couple of rooms, so
each assessment type is separated from the others.
Exams
12. There are usually two assessors each in the theory
room, the shack and the room used for practical
demonstrations.
The remote station for on-air contacts is usually not an
assessor but an instructor or other volunteer from the
College membership.
We find the most complicated part of any exam day is
making sure all the paperwork is correct.
Ham College now has two people at an exam session
processing the paperwork.
Exams
13. To speed up the paperwork processing, we have
developed a couple of internal spreadsheets to calculate
the fees to be charged, track exam scores and provide
the details for various paper form fields.
Exams
14. We now track every exam session and keep statistics on
the number of candidates, the number of exams
attempted, scores, percentages, etc.
Statistics
(NAMES AND PACK
NUMBERS SANITISED
FOR PRIVACY. RESULTS
ARE ACCURATE HOWEVER.)
15. In the last 12 months, we:
• Have had a total of 65 students attend College courses -
• 33 Foundation
• 12 Standard
• 14 Regulations
• 6 Advanced
• Conducted 87 exams -
• 32 Foundation + Practical combined (32 C, 0 NYC)
• 17 Standard (14 C, 3 NYC)
• 22 Regulations (19 C, 3 NYC)
• 10 Advanced (9 C, 1 NYC)
• 5 Practical assessments taken alone (5 C, 0 NYC)
• 91% of students sitting an assessment in 2012 passed.
Statistics
16. The biggest issue for us is distance – how do we cover
rural and regional areas?
Assessors have travelled to towns such as Mount Barker
to conduct exams which is a four-hour drive from Perth.
Because we’re a small and specialised club, once we’ve
trained people up, new hams need to join other clubs
for mentoring and fellowship.
How do we make sure new hams don’t get “lost” and
end up disillusioned?
Issues We’ve Faced
17. Online content for distance education is being
developed but it’s a very long and labour-intensive
process and progress is slow.
Most of the training is done by two or three trainers.
How do we get more people interested in contributing
to helping train new hams or upgrade the skills of
existing ones?
Issues We’ve Faced
18. This has been an overview of how Ham College conducts
training and assessment, and some of the challenges
we’ve faced.
Some of those challenges we’ve overcome, some we
haven’t.
How does education, training and assessment work in
your club?
What issues have you had, and how have you solved
them (if you have)?
What can we learn from each other?
Over To You
Editor's Notes
Good afternoon, we’re Doug VK6DB and Neil VK6BDO from Ham College.This presentation is an overview of how Ham College runs its training courses and assessments.As we go through the slides, please ask questions if there’s anything you’re not clear about or want some more information on.
Who is Ham College?Only dedicated amateur radio education and training club in Australia.▼Only amateur radio organisation in Western Australia to train all three grades of licence.▼Formed due to education being the “poor relation” in the activity of local clubs.▼Only a small club with membership open to anyone with an interest in education and training in amateur radio. Talk about how education and training wasn’t the ‘core business’ of any of the local amateur radio clubs and it was decided that establishing a club who’s primary focus be on education, training and assessment would be an asset to the local amateur community.Local clubs direct people interested in getting an amateur radio licence to Ham College, where we train them and then send them back to the clubs to get involved in the hobby.The Scouts are the other organisation in WA training amateurs but they only train people involved in Scouting and generally only to the Foundation level. Other clubs have also done amateur training in the past but none are doing so at the moment.
Our Training FacilitiesHam College is based in the Lynwood Scout Hall building (which is in the middle of a public golf course!)We got access to the site as Neil used to be involved in Scouting in this area. The hall isn’t used as much as it could be for Scout activities so there’s been plenty of room for us to run courses and set up a shack.
Foundation CoursesHam College runs a Foundation course for one weekend every two months.▼No pre-reading is required, all the material is covered from scratch during the course.▼The course alternates throughout the weekend between theory slides, practical demonstrations and candidates on air under supervision.▼Each session runs for about 50 minutes, with a 10 minute break between sessions.▼Exams are held the following weekend after the course.Talk about how we have three or four regular presenters for the Foundation level course and each presenter takes different sessions to break up the delivery. The course takes up a full weekend, usually 9am to 4:30pm on the Saturday and 10am to 4pm on the Sunday. (Sunday morning we put the WIA News / NewsWest on and one or two candidates each course participate in the callbacks… Their first time to be on air ‘for real’!)There’s as much learning going on in the tea breaks between sessions as in the lessons themselves! Candidates are encouraged to ask lots of questions.Explain how we cover as much material as possible more than once – sometimes with a PowerPoint slide, and then with practical examples such as the transmission lines, connectors, etc.The students get to watch a demonstration of the on-air calling procedure, then they all get a chance to do it themselves with the whole class present. They then get a second run-through with just themselves in the room with an instructor so they know what the real exam will feel like. Another instructor runs the remote station.
Foundation CoursesMaterial for our PowerPoint presentation is a combination of custom-written slides and information from other sources (with attribution at the end)▼Example slide from the Foundation course:▼Explain how the slides don’t follow the Foundation manual but jump around. Students are encouraged to ask questions at any point during the presentation rather than wait for the end of each session. If they want to do some follow-up reading later, the page numbers from the Foundation manual are in the lower-right corner of each screen.
Foundation CoursesThe College has three amateur callsigns – VK6HC and VK6PIG are used in training courses by the candidate and the remote station. ▼VK6RIB is an information beacon project developed and operated by the College.▼Foundation courses have a limit of 8 candidates, otherwise it takes too long to run everyone through all the practical components.▼Exams run the weekend after the course. We used to use the callsigns of the instructors and remote station but these would vary between the Saturday and Sunday on the course and also for the exam. By getting two club callsigns, we make sure the station calling and the station being called are always the same which helps in the student’s learning.The reason we have a maximum of eight candidates on a course is because they all need to practice the VHF and HF calling procedures in the course and also on the exam day. More than eight students makes for a very long day.The Foundation students sit their written and theory assessments on the Saturday following the course. This gives us two full days of training, meaning we don’t rush through any of the topics. Occasionally we may run one or two exams after the course finishes on the Sunday if we have students from country towns. It’s not fair to ask them to come to Perth two weekends in a row.
Standard / Advanced CoursesWhile Foundation courses are run every two months, Ham College runs one Standard and one Advanced course per year.▼These courses run for three hours per night, one night per week, for approximately five months.▼The Standard course starts in February and finishes in June, then the Advanced course starts in July and finishes in November.▼Ham College has its own training manual that covers both the Standard and Advanced material.▼Advanced syllabus content is highlighted with a box.By writing our own manual, we can customise it and add / delete / change content as we see fit. Every couple of years the manual gets a revision as errors are corrected or new material is written. We use the feedback from each Standard or Advanced course to improve the manual’s content.Experience has shown that students who start at Foundation, move to Standard and then on to Advanced show the highest pass rates. While each course can operate as a stand alone module, each level builds on the knowledge gained in the previous one and it allows for some items to be treated as revision while other material is introduced new.
Standard / Advanced CoursesExample pages from the Standard / Advanced manual:▼You can see from the sample pages that some areas are surrounded by a box. These are topics that are only required for the Advanced course. When the Standard course is running, we simply skip over any of the boxed material. For an Advanced course, the entire manual is taught from the beginning – the Standard material is treated as revision and the new material is then covered fully.
Standard / Advanced CoursesThe Standard course includes the Regulations theory.▼First hour of the first six weeks is Regulations, then Standard theory for the remaining two hours.▼Once the Regulations material has been studied, the students sit that exam on a class night. The remainder of the Standard course is then three hours of theory.▼The Advanced course revises all the previous material in Standard and introduces the new material.▼It is primarily designed as an upgrade from Standard but can be taken alone.There really doesn't seem to be any easy way to learn the Regulations part other than just memorising the important parts of the LCD and doing lots of drills and practice exams. The front part of the Ham College manual consists of the Amateur Licence information paper, the callsigns and operating procedures documents from that ACMA website and the LCD. The main purpose in doing the Regulations exam after about six weeks is so the information is fresh in the student's mind and to allow the remainder of the course to be devoted to the Standard theory material.
Standard / Advanced CoursesFor people who can’t commit to attending weekly classes due to work commitments or because they aren’t in Perth, Ham College recommends the Radio and Electronics School in Queensland.▼We also make our manuals available if people wish to self-study.▼Our manuals don’t just go to people from WA. Over the last couple of years, at least one has gone to someone in NSW and one to Qld!▼The manuals are designed to cover the entire Standard and Advanced syllabi and the courses give candidates a solid background to all the topics.The cost of the manual is designed to cover what it costs us to develop, revise and print the copies, hole-punch them and put them into lever arch files. We try not to have the costs of the materials we sell any higher than necessary due to the costs of the course, the exams, the licence & callsign, etc. The combined Regulations + Standard course is charged at $150 including the manual. The Advanced course is $120 not including the manual. A manual alone is $40 and covers Regulations, Standard theory and Advanced theory.
ExamsHam College runs exam sessions every two months, on the weekend after each Foundation course.▼The exam sessions are open to anyone.▼It’s not unusual to have 15 candidates at an exam day.▼We usually field around 6 assessors at an exam session which allows us to concurrently run theory exams, practical demonstrations and on-air contacts.▼The Scout hall has a main hall and a couple of rooms, so each assessment type is separated from the others. Exam days are open to anyone who wants to sit an exam for any grade of licence. The majority of students at an exam day are ones who have done the Foundation course the week before, but we are finding more people coming back for higher level exams as well.To sit an exam, a candidate needs to let the College know two weeks in advance so we can make sure enough exam packs of the right type are in stock.By having six assessors at an exam session, it means the assessments really are a collaborative effort and a student will encounter multiple assessors as they move from one activity to another. Two assessors will be supervising the written section, then other assessors will be doing the “toybox” and on-air parts of the practical.
ExamsThere are usually two assessors each in the theory room, the shack and the room used for practical demonstrations.▼The remote station for on-air contacts is usually not an assessor but an instructor or other volunteer from the College membership.▼We find the most complicated part of any exam day is making sure all the paperwork is correct.▼Ham College now has two people at an exam session processing the paperwork.By having the different types of assessment in different rooms, we can cycle candidates through fairly efficiently. For the students from the foundation course, we get them to turn up during the day in 45 minute intervals. This gives them time to do the theory then move onto the practical while the next student is arriving to do their theory, etc.The paperwork is the biggest challenge, making sure that it’s all correct. With the wide variety of students sitting different types and combinations of exams then applying for different licence options, it’s a lot of work to make sure the paperwork in each pack is accurate. It’s no exaggeration to say that filling out all the paperwork takes as long as it does to sit the actual exam in a lot of cases.We have tried different ways of filling out the paperwork. One way was to have an assessor get a group of students to all fill out the paperwork at the same time, step by step. This never seemed to be 100% successful – someone would always be writing slower and holding the group up, someone else would be writing faster and “skip ahead”. They rarely stayed in a group and inevitably something would get missed.The way that seems to work best for us is to have a dedicated “paperwork filler” who sits with each candidate and helps them fill out all the forms with the right information in the right places. However on a busy exam weekend the paperwork isn’t being filled out fast enough to keep up with the people doing the exams so we now have two dedicated paperwork-fillers wherever possible.
ExamsTo speed up the paperwork processing, we have developed a couple of internal spreadsheets to calculate the fees to be charged, track exam scores and provide the details for various paper form fields. ▼At the exam sessions there’s normally at least one or sometimes two laptops either belonging to the College or brought by staff. We have a number of internal tools that have been developed to help in the filling out of the paperwork. For example one form asks for the number correct whereas a different form asks for the number of questions incorrect.Candidates also frequently have difficulty with the box on the Form 1 document asking for their height in centimetres. They often know their height in feet and inches, so a quick converter is included in the spreadsheet.The fee calculator spreadsheet is to accurately determine how much each candidate needs to pay for the number and type of exams they have undertaken on that day.Eventually, we’d like to see the form-filling being done online or at least automated to a greater degree. This has the potential to save a lot of time.
StatisticsWe now track every exam session and keep statistics on the number of candidates, the number of exams attempted, scores, percentages, etc.▼We have a master spreadsheet that tracks all our enrolments both for courses and exam days. The spreadsheet displayed here is relatively new and is used for statistics on individual exam days. It tracks things like how many candidates there were on the day, how many different exams were sat, the scores and percentages, etc.This is partly for our own information but it is also a barometer to our training – if candidates are routinely passing their exams then we know the training is effective.
StatisticsIn the last 12 months, we:▼Have had a total of 65 students attend College courses - 33 Foundation12 Standard14 Regulations6 Advanced▼Conducted 87 exams - 32 Foundation + Practical combined (32 C, 0 NYC)17 Standard (14 C, 3 NYC)22 Regulations (19 C, 3 NYC)10 Advanced (9 C, 1 NYC)5 Practical assessments taken alone (5 C, 0 NYC)▼91% of students sitting an assessment in 2012 passed.▼These are the figures for our last twelve months. As you can see we have been fairly busy with our five Foundation courses, on Standard and one Advanced course in the year, plus candidates just wanting to sit exams without having done a course.We’re proud of our pass rate of over 90%.
Issues We’ve FacedThe biggest issue for us is distance – how do we cover rural and regional areas?▼Assessors have travelled to towns such as Mount Barker to conduct exams which is a four-hour drive from Perth.▼Because we’re a small and specialised club, once we’ve trained people up, new hams need to join other clubs for mentoring and fellowship.▼How do we make sure new hams don’t get “lost” and end up disillusioned?As said in the slide, trips of 300-400km to run an assessment session isn’t unheard of. Distance presents two problems – students having the ability to come to us to do a course, and our ability to travel to where the students are to run an exam.We have a number of remote assessments done via our Nominated Assessor when it’s not practical for them to come to Perth.We’re the only specialist AR training club in Australia which we think gives us a big advantage in being able to provide quality training to people wanting to learn and get their licence. However as a club we don’t do field days, we don’t do contesting, we don’t have regular members’ meetings, etc. Unlike other clubs where a new ham is mentored and introduced to new things in the hobby, we don’t currently have the capacity to do that. So how can we make sure that the people we’re training get the full experience and join a club? At the moment we promote all the local clubs and talk about what each one does. In turn, all the clubs forward on any queries on becoming an amateur to us – but could we and should we be doing more?
Issues We’ve FacedOnline content for distance education is being developed but it’s a very long and labour-intensive process and progress is slow.▼Most of the training is done by two or three trainers. How do we get more people interested in contributing to helping train new hams or upgrade the skills of existing ones?▼We’ve had the idea of making our courses deliverable electronically now for a number of years. The Radio and Electronics School have already achieved what we are aiming to do for the Foundation level but we want to do a similar thing for Standard and Advanced.The biggest barrier at the moment is time and manpower – the people who could be writing the online course are the ones who are doing the bulk of the face to face training.We do have one or two guest speakers coming down on our courses. One person regularly takes the session on antennas and feedlines for our Standard/Advanced courses and others come down to help out at the Foundation level. But overall we don’t get a lot of interest from the local amateur community in coming to give us a hand. How can we get people interested in training?
Over To YouThis has been an overview of how Ham College conducts training and assessment, and some of the challenges we’ve faced.▼Some of those challenges we’ve overcome, some we haven’t.▼How does education, training and assessment work in your club?▼What issues have you had, and how have you solved them (if you have)?▼What can we learn from each other?Questions?
