Capital City Amateur Radio Club, Inc

Technician Self Training Courses and Materials 2022

There are currently three classes of Amateur Radio Licenses issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Technician, General and Extra Classes.  With each license comes additional operational frequencies and privileges.  The license classes must be taken in order with the Technician Class being the entry level license.  In other words, someone wanting the General Class License must pass both the Technician and General Class exams, which can be taken separately or at the same time.  The Technician license gives you operational privileges above 30 MHz allowing you to communicate locally and worldwide using VHF/UHF frequencies, amateur satellites and many of the new digital amateur radio modes. 

Today there are many instructional aids available on the internet to assist in studying for the amateur licenses.  The recommended method of studying for the Technician Licensing exam is to obtain a license manual and study the exam questions in the current FCC question pool.  The question pool consists of 350 questions broken down into 10 sub-categories.  There will be 35 of these multiple choice questions from the 10 different sub-categories on the FCC license exam.   When purchasing a Technician license manual or other study materials, be sure it has the latest study question pool issued in 2018 and good through June 2022.  Older books are sometimes advertised on the web for a cheaper price but they don’t have the current question pool making them useless for studying for a current exam. 

Suggested steps for studying for your Technician License Exam:

1. Obtain American Radio Relay License Manual for Technician License. Order latest edition (5 th edition) from ARRL directly or Amazon (cheapest price). There is also a copy of the latest manual in the Lewis and Clark Library in Helena that can be checked out.

and the W4EEY course

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI3DKjqB4OLY2UXm2KqDpwQ/

featured follow the book chapter by chapter and have been used successfully by students passing their exams. There are other courses on-line that charge a fee.

3. As you are studying, start to review the study questions using one of the free on-line study sites. An excellent site is https://hamexam.org/ which allows you to study the questions by groups (test elements). It also has a nice flash card section to study the questions.

4. When you are ready, take some free on-line practice exams to determine how you would do on the actual licensing exam. The https://hamexam.org/, http://www.eham.net and www.qrz.com have practice exams as does several other websites. Take many exams and on several sites to get a good mix of questions and boost your confidence.

5. Locate an actual in-person exam or register for a remote testing examination. The Capital City Amateur Radio Club (CCARC) posts it's in-person exam schedule on it's website ccarc.org . The Great Falls and Bozeman radio clubs also offer monthly in-person testing.