Michael Burnette - The Fast Track to Your General Class Ham Radio License

The Fast Track

to Your

General Class

Ham Radio License

by Michael Burnette, AF7KB

Covers all FCC General Class ExamQuestions July 1, 2015 until June 30, 2019

All original content Copyright 2016, Michael Burnette. All rightsreserved.

This book or any portion thereof maynot be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without theexpress written permission of the publisher except for the use ofbrief quotations in a book review. Smashwords edition.

The Fast Track

To Your

General Class Ham RadioLicense

Is now available as an unabridgedaudiobook.

Available from audible.com,amazon.com, and iTunes.

Over 14 hours ofinstruction .

The Fast Track Mission:To employ effective teaching strategies tosupport learners in rapidly mastering the body of knowledgethat creates the ham radio hobby.

Dedication

For Chris Byrd, KB7LCR

My friend, teacher, and fellow truck driver,who said, "You know, you ought to get into ham radio. It's prettycool." He was right.

Congratulations on your choice to get yourGeneral Class Amateur Radio License.

There are many reasons you might have chosento get that ticket.

General Class opens up the HF bands to you.You'll be able to transmit on most of the ham frequencies from 160meters clear up through 70 centimeters and beyond.

Because those frequencies open up, many moremodes of transmission become available to you, including SingleSideband Phone, and a vast array of digital modes.

In addition to more frequencies and moremodes, your on-the-air ham universe expands to encompass the entireglobe! Getting your General opens up the possibility of working DX,talking with folks in other countries. (DX is short for "distance",and is ham shorthand for international conversations.) When itcomes to expanding your possibilities within the hobby, in terms ofwhat you might call your return on investment, the General Classlicense has to be one of the greatest bargains in hamradio.

Those General Class frequencies have gotten alot easier to participate in over the years, too. Time was whenworking the HF bands meant you would be devoting a whole room ofyour home (or a big part of the basement) to housing big radios aseparate receiver, transmitter, antenna tuner, power amplifier,speaker, and all sorts of other stuff. That equipment could becantankerous and undependable, too. Today, you can purchase an "allband" (HF, VHF, UHF) radio with amazing features folks neverdreamed of in the old days, and the whole thing is about the sizeof a car stereo unit. Perhaps you have dreams of working DX from amountaintop with your portable rig, or adventuring off to a distantisland on a DXpedition.

Maybe your reason for going for your Generalis none of the above. Maybe you just want the satisfaction of asense of accomplishment, or perhaps you are just a curious soul whoenjoys learning more about radio and the ham radio hobby. That'scool, too!

The objective of this book is to teach you topass your General Class exam. It certainly will not teach youeverything about electronic theory nor about ham radio both ofthose topics offer a lifetime opportunity for learning, becauseyou'll never learn all of either of them.

The Fast Track program is based on thesimple notion that the easiest way to pass any test is to brace yourself actually know the material, and know at least alittle bit more than is required. It's also rooted in my beliefthat there's more to ham radio than just passing tests. More thanjust wanting you to pass the exam, I want you to be a competent,knowledgeable ham. While this little course can't fully accomplishthat goal, it can at least leave you knowledgeable enough to startasking smart questions. I confess, that's both for your ownenjoyment of the hobby and so you can contribute to other folks inthe hobby. To those ends, I've endeavored to give you the theoryand background behind the questions, to give you some context forthem, as it were. Really, a lot of the challenge of the Generalexam and the other ham exams is rooted in this lack of context.The questions are based on larger body of knowledge, but they'rejust little dribs and drabs snipped from that knowledgebase.

For example, the exam asks you to know thatthe approximate junction threshold voltage of a germanium diode is0.3 volts. If your life has included some time working on, say, ahome-designed and home-built receiver, and you've done someresearch into the topic, perhaps you've found out that germaniumdiodes are often used for RF demodulators in part because of alower threshold voltage than silicon diodes. Even if you've justbeen playing around with building electronic stuff for a while, youmight have absorbed that fact in the course of your reading. Then,the little factoid fits into a context and becomes something atleast marginally relevant to you. But if you've done none of that,and don't know a germanium diode from a lovely bouquet ofgeraniums, that fact is just trivia. In the Fast Trackcourse, I'll give you at least a bit of background for that fact todwell in.

I also go through each of the wrong answersthat will be on the exam the answers you don't want to choose,and for many of them, I explain why they are incorrect. That methodmakes the course longer, but I don't want you getting surprised orconfused by anything on testing day.

We'll also take the occasional detour intohistory or trivia, if for no other reason than just to keep thingsinteresting and, again, to lend some context to the material. Ialso purposefully repeat myself several times on some topics repetition drives a point into our brains!

I can't predict whether the General Class examwill be more challenging for you than the Technician Exam. A lot ofthat depends on your prior education and experience. My guess isthat for most people, the General is a step up in difficulty fromTechnician. There's a bit more math, and you'll definitely want topractice with your calculator and bring it to the exam, but it'smostly basic arithmetic, and I'll take you step by step througheach of those math problems.

The General class exam topics cover a broaderrange than the Technician, go into more depth, and do cover sometopics that are, for want of a better expression, a little moreesoteric than those on the Technician Exam, but you'll find that aconsiderable amount of learning those topics is simply masteringthe vocabulary. You don't need your doctorate in ElectricalEngineering for this test. You won't need to memorize any hugeschematics or be able to design a transceiver from scratch, noranything remotely like that. Actually, there's only one schematicdiagram, and much like the Technician exam, you just need toidentify a few component symbols on that schematic.

In terms of sheer quantity, there isconsiderably more content in this exam than is in the Technician.The sheer number of questions in the question pool is higher 462versus the Technician's 426. At the end of the program is a fullreview of all the topics covered in the test on the audioversion, it takes almost an hour-and-a-half to go through thereview, so there's definitely a lot of material to cover and absorbhere.

The General exam does go into a good deal moredepth than the Technician, especially in the area of hookingdifferent components together, or what I call the guzintas andguzouttas. This guzinta that, that guzzoutta this ... you know.That's because of the nature of the General world. Let's face it most Technician stuff is pretty much plug 'n' play. If you justhave a handy-talky VHF/UHF radio, you're not worried about matchingthe transmitter to the antenna you just screw on the antenna thatcame with the radio, or maybe an upgraded antenna, but most of thestuff is designed to work together. If you have a mobile set-up,you got yourself an antenna for your vehicle, screwed the connectoron the feed line to the radio, stuck the antenna on the roof, andyou were in business.