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I passed the test last week­end, but as of yes­ter­day I have a call­sign so I am offi­cially a licensed ama­teur radio oper­a­tor in the United States and any­where else where ama­teurs are gov­erned by the FCC or where the US has rec­i­p­ro­cal licens­ing agreements.

I don’t have any hard­ware yet, but I’m now look­ing for some starter gear and get­ting myself on Echolink.

Call­sign is KD8JQS

I just got back from vot­ing and sur­pris­ingly it was unevent­ful.  I say sur­pris­ingly because this is Ohio, where 2004 and 2006 elec­tions have shown sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns with the elec­tronic vot­ing machines AND on top of that they’re Diebold Accu­Vote TSX units.  Diebold of course being known for appar­ently not using a bit of their secu­rity knowl­edge gained from devel­op­ing ATMs on their vot­ing machines.

I showed up at the polling loca­tion at a bit after 8 AM, fail­ing to find it on the first pass even though there are huge signs out front say­ing “VOTE HERE”.  I blame that on being a bit hung over (yes­ter­day sucked, so Nick and I tried to invent a Jeremy Clark­son drink­ing game with a bot­tle of Skyy while watch­ing Thriller).

Here was the only real issue I had all morn­ing.  I hadn’t a clue what precinct I was in for my polling loca­tion, when I voted in 2004 there was basi­cally one place for every­one reg­is­tered on cam­pus.  The map they offered wasn’t help­ful at all, so even­tu­ally I found a list of names that I was on and caught a very tiny “D” marked in the cor­ner.  I wan­dered over to the Precinct D table, showed my ID, signed in, and was handed a smart card.  After about 5 min­utes in line I walked up and went through the system.

The UI was actu­ally quite nice, well designed, and clear.  The font ren­der­ing made it clear there was Win­dows behind it which is a bit annoy­ing, but I already knew that.  The ver­i­fi­ca­tion page was decent and I enjoyed how it printed the infor­ma­tion page by page as I looked at it on the screen, allow­ing for easy ver­i­fi­ca­tion.  The only com­plaint I have about this part of the process is that the printer was badly cho­sen.  Fonts are small and ther­mal paper just doesn’t last.

After ver­i­fy­ing my vote, the smart card popped out.  I handed it to a poll worker and headed to work.