1. 3 Days of shop operations. You are going to be introduced to Technical Manuals and how to do paper work. YES it's seriously 3 days of learning how to do paperwork. This is where you realized you signed up to be a technician and part of being a technician is learning how to navigate through thick manuals and quickly. You may never know how to fix every problem but you will learn to find the information that you need so that you can.
2. 2 weeks of BET ( Basic Electronics Training ) - This course is called the blue screen of death. You sit in front of a computer and read material like you would find in a text book and do tests and quizes like you would an online class. There are experiments where you take circuit boards and connect them to a board that simulates faults in them. You will use a multimeter, oscilliscope and a function generator. The course is designed for people with no electronics background. You will go from cartoon pictures explaining to what electricity is to calculating voltage drops, impedance and comprehending technical schematics in just two weeks.
A lot of people complain about how boring this class is. Don't listen to them. If you signed up for this MOS because you are actually interested in electronics bet will be fun. Plus everything is relaxed and done at your own pace BET.
The biggest problems students experienced in this part of class was staying awake and following written or verbal instructions. People who fall behind in class can attend what is essentially study hall in the evenings. Often times the instructors will do paper work to make it mandatory for you to go and you get in trouble if you don't show up. By this point in BET we lost 2 people who get recycled to a previous class.
3. 1 Week of Trouble Shooting - During this week we returned back to the classroom we did shop operations in. During this week they give you a piece of radio equipment and a schematic for it. We colored the schematic so that we could more easily understand the different components and then learned about the critical areas of interest on it. Afterwards we used two large, grey box shaped pieces of equipment to diagnose faults in the subject radio piece and begin trouble shooting. For our final test at the end of the week we had to sit down at a desk, use the equipment to diagnose where in the radio the fault probably was and then use a multimeter to find the exact fault while referring to the schematic. We had to do this successfully 2 out of 3 times and fill out the correct paper work in order to pass. This was probably the most technician like thing I have done in the army so far and I enjoyed it. But I'm not going to lie a lot of us were sweating bullets on that test day.
Currently we are in the secure building. I will discuss more on this later.
