Ham Radio Question Pool

Amateur radio question pools in various formats.

In the US most anyone can get a license to operate an amateur radio station (i.e. HAM radio) by taking a multiple choice test. There are no age restrictions and the test questions are publically available.

There are actually three tests of increaing difficulty:

• Technician
• General
• Amateur Extra

Passing the technican test means that you get a technican license which allows you to operate a station in various specific radio bands, mostly in the VHF and UHF regions of the radio spectrum.

Passing the general test in addition to the technician test gives you access to more frequencies while passing the amateur extra test gives you even more.

You do need to pass the tests in order, first technician, then general, then amateur extra, but there's no requirement that you keep going - you can stop at technican or general.

In any case, while the questions are publically available at NCVEC, they are delivered in Word or PDF format. This project aims to make the questions accessable in various machine readable formats, including:

• JSON
• YAML
• CSV
• Simple plain text

Usage

The JSON version looks like this:

[
  {
    "id": "T1A01",
    "correct": 2,
    "refs": "[97.1]",
    "question": "Which of the following is part of the Basis and Purpose of the Amateur Radio Service?",
    "answers": [
      "Providing personal radio communications for as many citizens as possible",
      "Providing communications for international non-profit organizations",
      "Advancing skills in the technical and communication phases of the radio art",
      "All these choices are correct"
    ]
  },
  //...
]

Note that the correct answer index is zero based, so that the correct answer to question T1A01 is the third one, Advancing skills in the technical and communication phases of the radio art.

Given all that, the YAML version is about what you would expect:

---
- :id: T1A01
  :correct: 2
  :refs: "[97.1]"
  :question: Which of the following is part of the Basis and Purpose of the Amateur
    Radio Service?
  :answers:
  - Providing personal radio communications for as many citizens as possible
  - Providing communications for international non-profit organizations
  - Advancing skills in the technical and communication phases of the radio art
  - All these choices are correct

And the CSV:

id,correct,question,a,b,c,d,refs
T1A01,2,Which of the following is part of the Basis and Purpose of the Amateur Radio Service?,Providing personal radio communications for as many citizens as possible,Providing communications for international non-profit organizations,Advancing skills in the technical and communication phases of the radio art,All these choices are correct,[97.1]

And last but certainly not least, the plain text version looks like this:

T1A01 (C) [97.1]
Which of the following is part of the Basis and Purpose of the Amateur Radio Service?
A. Providing personal radio communications for as many citizens as possible
B. Providing communications for international non-profit organizations
C. Advancing skills in the technical and communication phases of the radio art
D. All these choices are correct

...

Note that the correct answer ((C)) is coded in the question header along with the question ID and references to the appropriate regulations. Also note that there is a blank line after each question, including the last question.

Why?

I set out to do this work because I wanted to keep track of my progress with some simple tools of my own.

This project largely overlaps the fine work done by Jason Staten (https://github.com/statianzo) at https://github.com/statianzo/hampool.

I started doing my version before I found Jason's. I decided to put this one out there because the version of the General exam question pool in Jason's repo is now out of date.

In any case, hope someone gets some use from this.

See Also

Wikipedia has a good introduction to the whole topic of US amateur radio licensing.

The original source of the questions is NCVEC.

Jason Staten's fine work is at https://github.com/statianzo/hampool.

You can find online amateur radio testing at https://hamexam.org and https://arrlexamreview.appspot.com.