Every section of the exam, explained

The Basic exam is 100 questions, one from each subsection of the bank; the Advanced is 50. Each guide says what a section covers, lists its questions, and links to a drill.

Basic Qualification

• B-001 Regulations and policies — 199 questions. The rules: who may operate, what the certificate allows, station identification, third-party traffic, what you may and may not transmit, and how ISED regulates the amateur service.
• B-002 Operating and procedures — 99 questions. How to operate: calling, phonetics, Q-signals, repeaters, nets, emergency traffic, and the courtesies that keep a band usable.
• B-003 Station assembly, practice and safety — 199 questions. Building a station safely: power supplies, grounding, RF exposure, lightning, feedline routing, and what a transmitter, receiver and transceiver actually do.
• B-004 Circuit components — 63 questions. The parts inside the box: resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, transistors, tubes and what each does in a circuit.
• B-005 Basic electronics and theory — 142 questions. The theory: Ohm's law, power, series and parallel circuits, AC and DC, frequency and wavelength, decibels, and the metric prefixes the exam leans on.
• B-006 Feedlines and antenna systems — 140 questions. Getting the signal out: antennas, feedlines, SWR, baluns, matching, and why antenna length depends on frequency.
• B-007 Radio wave propagation — 87 questions. How signals travel: the ionosphere and its layers, skip, ground wave, sporadic E, and which bands work when.
• B-008 Interference and suppression — 55 questions. When things interfere: harmonics, overload, RFI to and from your station, filters, ferrites and how to fix the neighbour's TV.

Advanced Qualification

• A-001 Advanced theory — 54 questions. Advanced theory: time constants, reactance, impedance, resonance, Q, and the mathematics behind tuned circuits.
• A-002 Advanced components and circuits — 132 questions. Advanced components and circuits: semiconductors, amplifier classes, oscillators, mixers, filters and digital logic.
• A-003 Measurements — 66 questions. Measurements: meters, oscilloscopes, counters, signal generators, and what a reading actually tells you.
• A-004 Power supplies — 44 questions. Power supplies: rectifiers, filtering, regulation, switching supplies and their failure modes.
• A-005 Transmitters, modulation and processing — 99 questions. Transmitters, modulation and processing: AM, FM, SSB, keying, speech processing, and the numbers behind occupied bandwidth.
• A-006 Receivers — 55 questions. Receivers: superheterodyne design, selectivity, sensitivity, images, AGC and noise.
• A-007 Feedlines and matching — 99 questions. Feedlines and matching at the advanced level: transmission line theory, impedance transformation, stubs and matching networks.