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Ham radio provides the broadest and most powerful wireless communications capability available to any private citizen anywhere in the world. My initial motivation to join amateur radio was to do email "off the grid". I got my Technician ticket easily enough but stalled out on the three-sound characters in the Morse Code. I upgraded to Extra by taking the written exams the month before the the code requirement expired, then did the paperwork to make it official. I intended to use that testing session to get my General ticket and thought it would be good to do the Extra exam as a study guide, while waiting for the General exam to be scored. I "accidentally" passed the Extra exam by one question! (Note that I had actually gone through the Extra study book a year previous. Apparently, enough theory stuck with me.) The default call-sign for the upgrade was rather unmemorable, sending me to the vanity call-sign system for something snappy with my initials.