Licence of amateur radio station in the USA ~ I will try to get it!

   Recently, my son got a licence of amateur radio station.   I do not believe that most of young generation kids are interested in amateur radio since the internet might be much convenient and fun for their communication.  It is probably different from when I was a student long time ago.  However, I do not know why, but he is interested in amateur radio.

   The license is getting changed a lot recently.  There are only 3 classes of license, "Technician", "General" and "Extra".   There is no morse code related test any more.   My son got "Technician" this time.

Licensing Exam

The exam is total 35 questions and more than 74% of correct answer is required.  Each questions has 4 selections of answer and pick one of correct answer.  The questions include regulations and technical questions.   The exam my son took was in a fire station with hosted by volunteers.   If a candidates pass the exam, then the information will be registered in the FCC database with Call-Sign.  Then they can start operating amateur radio right away.  This is very different from the regulation in Japan. 

    He passed "Technician" and he allows to take "General" exam, but he could not pass since he did not study it at all.  In case people wants to get higher level license, they have to pass all exams from "Technician"   It seems that people can take exams in the same day.

I also plan to take exam ...

Here is today's topic.  Since my son got the license, I also want to get one.   I have a license issued by Japanese government about 40 years ago.   Based on the regulation, I could do it with Japanese license.   However, it is probably interesting experience for me and I want to take the exams to get "Extra" license here.    Thus, I just started checking the questions in the past.   Since I study this area about 40 years ago, the contents is changed a lot!

   Regarding the regulation, it is basically the same for international regulation.   However regulation in the USA is different from Japan and some of term in the regulation is not typical words I usually use in the daily life.  Therefore I probably need to learn the term for this exam.   For technical related questions, I learned it before and I probably understand majority of questions.  But the style of question is very different from what I took the exam in Japan.  Also some new technology such as data communications and etc, I probably need to learn more to pass "Extra" class.   I am on the border line to pass "Extra".   I guess I might be able to pass "Technician" and "General" without much extra effort.  However, to pass "Extra" I might need to spend some time to learn some areas.

   Here is a site of ARRL (The national Association of Amateur Radio) where we can find the questions in the past.   It seems that this is a new project and one of my objective for the coming year!