FCC amateur radio licence
All 1,431 questions the examiners are allowed to ask you — every one with a written explanation — drilled on a schedule that keeps bringing back the ones you get wrong, until they stop being the ones you get wrong.
Forty questions free, on whichever course you like — no card. Your progress is saved to your account and works with no signal at all.
The exam is drawn from a published pool. Knowing that pool cold is the whole job, and that is a memory problem before it is a theory problem.
Every question sits in one of five boxes. Get it right and it moves up, returning in one day, then three, then a week, then three weeks. Get it wrong and it drops to the bottom and you see it tomorrow. You spend your time on what you don't know.
The examiners draw exactly one question from every group in the pool. So does this — 35 questions for Technician and General, 50 for Extra, timed, 74% to pass. Not a random handful that happens to be the right length.
The choices are shuffled every single time, so you can't coast on remembering that it was the third one. Every question shows its FCC rule citation and the topic the examiners filed it under.
Every single question
Memorising 1,431 right answers works until the examiners reword one. So every question here carries a written explanation — not a restatement of the answer, but the reason it is the answer.
A hundred of them come out to a number. Those are recalculated from scratch every time the site is built and checked against the official answer key, so an explanation whose arithmetic disagrees with the pool cannot ship. It has caught real mistakes.
What is Doppler shift in reference to satellite communications?
Each one is a separate FCC element with its own question pool. Start at Technician — you cannot sit the others first.
Where everyone starts. VHF and UHF voice, repeaters, digital modes, and enough rules and theory to operate safely.
409 questions · 35 on the exam · pool valid 2026–2030
Most of the HF bands open up. This is the licence that gets you talking to the rest of the world.
423 questions · 35 on the exam · pool valid 2023–2027
Every privilege there is. Heavy on circuit theory, propagation and the rules, and by some distance the hardest of the three.
599 questions · 50 on the exam · pool valid 2024–2028
No lessons to sit through first. You start answering immediately and the schedule does the rest.
Twenty questions a session. Due cards first, then ones you have never seen. Answer with the mouse or with the A–D keys and Enter — it is built to be fast.
Not a progress bar — the probability you would pass the exam today. The examiners draw one question from each of the 35 groups, so that is 35 separate chances, each worked out from your own record and how long ago you set it. It is easy to have 80% of the pool learned and still be a coin flip, and this is the number that says so. It also names the subelement costing you the most marks.
Timed, correctly composed, no feedback until you submit. Afterwards you get a breakdown of where you dropped marks and a one-click drill on just those questions.
Amateur radio is the only service that lets you build, modify and operate your own equipment across the whole radio spectrum — and the only dependable long-range communication that needs neither the internet nor a mobile network.
One payment, kept forever. No subscription, no countdown clock, and no price with a line through it that was never the price.
40
questions, no card
$24
each, one payment
$49
one payment
Taking the exam itself costs extra and that money does not come here: the volunteer examiners charge around $15, and the FCC charges a separate $35 application fee paid directly to them. Under-18s pay $5 at ARRL sessions, and the ARRL covers the FCC fee for them.
Every question is from the official pool published by the National Conference of Volunteer Examiner Coordinators. Those pools are public — the examiners publish them precisely so you can study them — which is why nobody needs to charge you for the questions themselves.
These are current to the February 2026 errata, and questions the NCVEC has withdrawn are left out, which is why the question numbering has gaps in it.
No. Technician assumes nothing. The explanations are written for someone meeting each idea for the first time, which is exactly why they exist — a question bank with no explanations quietly assumes you already know the material.
Honestly: if free works for you, use it. HamStudy is good and it is free, and the question pools themselves are public domain — nobody should charge you for the questions.
What you are paying for here is everything around them: an explanation on every single question written to teach rather than restate, exams composed the way the examiners actually compose them, and a pass probability that tells you whether you are ready instead of how much you have covered. The free trial exists precisely so you can judge the writing before paying for anything.
A team of volunteer examiners runs the session, either in person or over video. The ARRL and other coordinators list sessions near you, and remote sessions run most days of the week.
Expect to pay the examiners about $15, and the FCC a separate $35 application fee after you pass. You may sit more than one element in the same session, so passing Technician and General on the same afternoon is common and costs no more.
Yes. Technician here is the 2026–2030 pool that took effect on 1 July 2026, current to the February 2026 errata. General is the 2023–2027 pool and Extra the 2024–2028 pool, which are the ones in force.
Questions the NCVEC has withdrawn are left out rather than quietly renumbered, which is why you will see gaps in the question numbers.
Yes. Add it to your home screen and the questions, explanations and exam figures are stored on the device. You can drill on a plane, in a basement or anywhere else the coverage has given up. Progress syncs again when you are back online.
One licensed ham, KC1IFN, who wanted a better way to study and could not find one. There are no ads, no trackers and no analytics on this site, and the pass estimate is deliberately honest even when the honest answer is discouraging — a study tool that flatters you is worse than useless on exam day.
Forty questions free on any course, every one of them explained. Nothing to pay and nothing to install.
Start drilling