Study guide
The question pool tests specific facts. These articles cover the concepts underneath a whole cluster of questions at once, the kind of understanding that makes the individual answers make sense instead of needing to be memorized cold.
T5
Ohm's Law, Without the Algebra Panic
The one formula that underlies a third of the electronics questions on your exam, and how to actually reason through it instead of memorizing three variations.
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T6
Reading Resistor Color Codes and Component Values
How the color-band system on a resistor actually encodes a number, and why component identification questions are really just pattern recognition once you see the structure.
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T2
How Repeaters Actually Work (and How to Sound Like You Know It)
The offset, the tone squelch, and the courtesy tone: what's actually happening electronically when you key up through a repeater, and why the etiquette rules exist.
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T3
Why Your Signal Sometimes Goes Ten Miles and Sometimes Ten Thousand
The ionosphere, line-of-sight, and why the same radio can behave completely differently depending on the band, the time of day, and even the sunspot cycle.
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T1
Reading a Band Privileges Chart Without Getting Lost
What all those little labeled segments on a frequency allocation chart actually mean, and how to figure out what you can do where, by license class, mode, and band.
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T0
RF Exposure Limits: What They Are and Why the FCC Cares
The Maximum Permissible Exposure concept, why it depends on power and frequency, and the practical station-safety habits that actually keep you under the limit.
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T9
Antennas and Feed Lines: Getting Your Signal Actually Out of the Radio
Why a mismatched antenna wastes real transmitter power, what SWR is actually measuring, and the handful of antenna types every new Technician should be able to recognize.
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T8
AM, FM, SSB, and Digital Modes: What's Actually Different About Them
What modulation means at a basic level, why FM sounds the way it does on repeaters, and how digital modes fit into the same underlying framework.
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T4
Setting Up Your First Station Without Breaking Anything
The handful of practical habits, power connections, grounding, interference basics, that separate a station that works reliably from one that causes constant small problems.
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T7
Practical Circuits: How the Building Blocks Combine
You already know the individual components from T6. This is about how they combine into the basic functional blocks, receivers, transmitters, power supplies, that make up the radio in front of you.
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