I passed my General a while back. Now I’m studying for Amateur Extra — the top US license class — and this post kicks off a series where I work through it in public, from the perspective of someone who’s here for the electronics more than the operating. This first one is about why the Extra material is worth your time...

An Elmer, in ham speak, is a mentor — the experienced operator who answers your dumb questions and gets you on the air. I’m lucky to have real ones. But I’m also an AI engineer with a rack of hardware running large language models in my house, so I’m running an experiment: can a local LLM be a useful second Elmer — a...