CAARA - Tech-in-A-Day Class - April 11th

Thank you!! I had been looking at getting into this recently.. Are there any books I can read ahead of time? How difficult is it to go all the way to the "Extra" certification?
 
Doc, first, some important background. The test will be 35 questions somewhat randomly pulled from a pool of about 400 questions. The FCC changes that pool of questions every 4 years. The question pool is public and published by the FCC. In the class you'll be studying the real questions with the real answers.

The ARRL License Manuals are pretty good. Here's the one for the Technician test. Caution: Amazon still sells the older manuals who's questions are out of date. Note the one I linked says "for use through June, 2018" on the cover. Watch out for buying old books, though the questions don't change that much.

To get a jump on things there are web sites where you can do practice tests. They use the real pool of questions. The site randomly pulls 35 for you to take. I like qrz.com's practice tests. Keep chugging through the tests until you are passing most of the time and you are ready for the real thing. There's lots more online study resources.

It's pretty rare for someone to pass all 3 in the same day, but it happens. If you are an Electrical Engineer it's quite possible.

If you pass the Tech it's free to take the General and if you pass that it's free to take the Extra test. If you fail one by a tiny bit the FCC requires $15 to re-take it, which you can do right there. At Tech-in-a-Day if you pass the Tech they encourage you to try the General. If you pass that they'll push you to try the Extra. They usually have 2-5 people get the Tech and General at the same time.

What I did was pre-study the Tech and General material before the big day. Then I deviated from their study program a bit and studied some of both during the day. If you walk in totally confident of the Tech material just show up with the General book and spend the day memorizing the General questions while everyone else does that with the Tech questions.
 
Ordered the books. I have a background in mass spectrometry, my RF knowledge is limited to how I can push ions around with it(and not annoy the neighbors by not shielding my generators)....
 
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