You can now study the General Class exam question which will be used after July 1, 2007. If you are planning to take the exam after July 1, you should use these questions. Otherwise, continue to study the current exam questions.

The current question pools for all three classes of licenses have been updated to reflect the most current list of questions which were withdrawn. Question can be withdrawn because they were incorrect, too vague or because FCC rules have changed.

Also added the October 1, 2006 revision of Part 97 of FCC rules to the regulations section. The previous May 3, 2006 revision is still there for reference in case you want to compare for the changes.

The site has a new look which makes it easier to read in most modern browsers. All pages were carefully created and validated to comply with the xhtml 1.0 strict standard. If you are still using IE6, things won't look quite right because its now some 6+ years outdated. I highly recommend upgrading to Firefox. Its free for the download at mozilla.org and is the most standards compliant of any browser available either free or commercially.

Callsign lookup is now faster due to improvements made to the program that handles that.

The Technician class exam now uses the July 1, 2006 version of the question pool. The exams for the other classes remain unchanged because the question pools are still valid.

US city location lookup was improved. The database behind this was updated to the most recently available version with more cities and accuracy improvements. Also the software that does the lookup was improved to allow faster and better name matching.

International city location lookup was also improved. Again the database was updated to the most current version. Again, more cities and accuracy improvements. The software that does a much better job of matching names. Some names include diacritics (accent marks) which are special characters to computers. The search now looks for names both with and with out diacritics.

The 2006 version of Part 97 of the FCC rules was added to the reference section. Effort was done to format the regulations to make them much easier to read than the simple text versions and include links to the relavant references.

When the site was launched in Apr 2005, the pages were coded to the HTML 4.0 standard. With the old pages, the text was too small to read at the higher screen resolutions used today. Since then standards have improved and the pages were migrated to the XTML 1.0 Strict standard. The main difference here is that pages will scale properly when viewed at a variety of screen resolutions like 800 x 600 and 768 x 1024 or higher. That is, the text will appear to be "normal" size no matter what resolution is used.

There is a downside here, older browsers will not render pages exactly right. In testing, IE6 was found to behave badly. It fails to render fonts and margins correctly. The pages are still viewable, but don't look as pretty as they should. Keep in mind that IE6 is now some 6 or more years behind the state of the art. If you are using Windows 2000 or older, the only path Microsoft provides is to upgrade to XP. As an alternative, I would suggest upgrading to the FireFox web browser available for free download at mozilla.org. I have found FireFox to be the most standards compliant of any browser I have used. Even more so than the comercial products.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with FireFox, this is the outgrowth of the orginal mozilla web browser project that started at NCSA (National Center on Super Computing) back in the early days of the internet. Later, Netscape took over sponsership of the project and the code base was used for the Netscape Browsers. After AOL aquired Netscape, the code was used in AOL's browers. It is my understanding, that shortly after the AOL aquisition, many of the developers became unhappy with the corporate direction of the browser and moved the project to mozilla.org.

Since the original mozilla code was developed with government funding at the Universtity of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, the code must remain "public domain" or "open source". That is it can't be sold. Hence, FireFox is availble for free via download at mozilla.org. Also, as an open source code project, the end results are driven by technical quality, not economics. Commercial derivatives of the code include Netscape, AOL, and IE.

The good news is that all pages here, were validated to the XTML 1.0 Strict standard, so any modern web browser that complies with this standard should give you the best view of the internet for many sites including 73ham.

The improvements made to the database update software, cleared a path to improve the actual lookup and display process used on the site. After totally recoding the program that runs this, the speed was improved by a factor of 2 or more in all cases.

Improvements to the geocoding process is now ready for use. The accuracy and completness were greatly improved, although there is still room for improvement in that area. Time for geocoding was reduced to about 90 minutes.

When the site was lauched back in 2005, it took about 14 hours to update the callsign database each week. Most of this time was spent on determining the coordinates (geocoding) of each home QTH. With a few changes, I reduced it to about 8 hours.

Work was started to improve both the speed, completeness and acurracy of the geocoding process. Some addresses can't be geocoded because they are post office boxes, others have a street or town which is unknown to the geocoding source that is used.

The site is now open to the public. The site is in a state where it can be useful to the Amateur Radio community. There is still are plenty oth things to add yet.

The crunching of data needed to convert to the latest geocding data is complete.

Geocoding is the process of determining the latitude and longitude for a callsign. Yesterday, the US Census Bureau released the 2004 first edition of its Tigerline database. This is the major source we (as well as many of the mapping sites) use for geocoding information. This is the most current available information.