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Introduction to General Class
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Listen to this page in audio format. Welcome to the Handiham audio lecture series. My name is
Patrick Tice, and my amateur radio call sign is WA0TDA. This audio lecture
series is for General Class, so I am going to assume that you already have your
Technician license and are interested in earning more amateur radio privileges
on the high frequency bands. Well, you have come to the right place! We are
going to learn about how to operate on the world wide short-wave bands. The
information that you will learn about in this course is actually going to be
somewhat familiar to you already. It builds upon what you have learned for you
first license. Just as with the Technician exam, the General Class exam will be
35 multiple-choice questions. Our lecture series will cover the question pool for General
Class effective July 1, 2011 through June 30, 2015. This question pool has been
prepared by the NCVEC, the National Conference of Volunteer Examiner
Coordinators. You can always find the very latest release of all of the amateur
radio question and answer pools at the NCVEC website, which is at www.ncvec.org.
At the Handiham System we maintain the question pool in some other
formats that we consider useful to our members with visual impairments or
disabilities. For example, we maintain a question pool with only the correct
answers given read into audio format. Many of our members find this kind of the
question pool to be helpful for review. When I do the audio lectures, I like to do more than simply
read the question from the question pool and tell you the correct answer. While
that may be useful for review purposes, the entire reason for having licensing
exams in the first place is to foster an understanding of electronics and the
laws of physics related to radio as well as the rules and regulations and
operating practices that are going to come in handy for you when you start
exploring the high frequency bands. Believe me, you will find this information
useful and relevant long after you pass your test. As your instructor, I feel a
responsibility to make sure that you are able to understand the material so that
you can be a good operator for the rest of your amateur radio career. This audio
lecture series is really only a beginning for you in your learning about the
wonderful world of amateur radio operation in the HF bands. In the years after
you pass your test, you will find that new technologies and modes of operation
will be introduced. That means you are always going to be learning something new
in amateur radio. In fact, I think this is what makes amateur radio so much fun
and what keeps my interest over the years. So, let's discuss some different ways to study. I am
generally able to produce one or two audio lectures per week. These are
announced in our Friday audio update, which we send out by e-mail from the
Handiham-notify mailing list. That list has a link to our latest audio page, and
you are going to want to look for any updates to the General lecture series. The
audio page also lists links to magazine digests and any changes in audio
lectures for Technician and Extra. However, you will want to concentrate on
General Class. If you have questions about a concept in the audio lectures, you
may e-mail me. I find that it is easiest to use my ARRL.net e-mail address,
which is my call sign, One of the benefits of ARRL membership is that you can get
that kind of an e-mail address that you can keep when you change Internet
providers. The phone number for my office is 763-520-0511. You can call that
number if you have a question about the audio lecture series that cannot be
answered by e-mail, but because of the volume of phone calls that I get it is
recommended that you send me your questions about the audio lecture series by
e-mail. That way, I can research the answer to your question so that I can get
back to you with the most complete explanation possible. You may also be interested in some reference books in print
that will be useful for your studies. The books that we recommend are The ARRL
General Class License Manual Seventh Edition and the Gordon West General Class
FCC Element 3 Amateur Radio License Preparation Manual, 2011-2015. Both of these
books include the entire General Class question pool and explanations about the
concepts and regulations related to each question. The ARRL book goes into more
detail while the Gordon West book takes the approach of targeted explanations
that are short and to the point. Both books are excellent; it is simply a matter
of deciding which approach is best for you if you want to purchase a
supplementary book. If you are blind, you are probably not going to be
interested in a print book and may want to simply study using the audio lecture
series. We do also have the Gordon West audio compact disc General Class study
guide, which you may find useful. After you get some serious studying under your belt, it is
time to think about taking some practice examinations. I think probably most of
you already know about taking practice examinations on the World Wide Web.
Although there are several excellent practice websites, the one that we have
found that is most consistently blind-accessible and well-maintained with
accessibility for people with disabilities in mind is the AA9PW website, which
you can find at Now, let’s mention a word about taking practice
examinations. It is tempting to get overly-dependent on simply memorizing the
question-and-answer pool by taking lots and lots of practice exams on the
Internet. In fact, it is possible to familiarize yourself enough with the
question pool to be successful in your real exam by just taking lots of practice
examinations and doing memorization. However, as I said before, my goal in this
audio lecture course is to make sure that you have a working understanding of
the electronics, the laws of physics, the operating practices, and the rules and
regulations that you will need long after you pass your examination! Believe me;
you are going to find that understanding the concepts comes in very useful later
on. Therefore, it is our goal in this course to do more than simply memorize to
pass the test. Does that mean that memorization is bad? Of course not! In
fact, some things just have to be memorized. Things like rules and regulations
"are what they are" and you should feel comfortable memorizing them. I
will attempt to explain the reasoning behind rules and regulations when it is
important and necessary to do so. Some of the regulations, such as the ones
relating to allocated frequencies, are simply things to memorize and that is
that. If I can offer any tips and tricks on how to remember things, I will
certainly try to do so. There are other concepts in HF operation such as radio
wave propagation where you will benefit from an explanation of how it works in a
little bit more depth. That will be useful information when you are involved in
contesting or working DX later on in your amateur radio career. Now, back to the question pool itself for a minute. As I
said, your examination is only going to be 35 multiple-choice questions. These
35 questions will be taken from the pool of 456 Element 3 General Class
questions. The way the question pools are structured, they are divided into 10
sections and the examination that you will take will have questions pulled from
each of those 10 sections. These sections are called "sub elements"
and they all start with the letter "G" followed by a single numerical
digit from 1 to 0. For the first
time, we have divided the question pool in audio format up into these sub
elements and then further divided each sub element by topic. The topics are
designated starting with the G, which stands for General, then comes the sub
element number, such as “1”, followed by the topic, which is designated by a
letter, such as “A”. For
example, sub element G4 is "Amateur Radio Practices". Under that sub
element, we find G4A, which covers questions related to "Station Operation
and Set up". So if we check into that section of the Handiham audio
question pool, we will hear Handiham volunteer reader Bob Zeida, N1BLF, reading
the questions related to that topic area. I think this will make it easier for
you to keep things sorted out as you work on your studies, because you can use
our list of sub elements and topic areas to find the part of the question pool
that you want to review. Here is the link to that page, which I hope you will
find useful. Please feel free to bookmark it in your web browser: One thing you will notice as you look at the question pool is that the subsections will be mentioned along with the number of questions that will be on your exam from that section. Here is an example: SUBELEMENT G1 - COMMISSION'S RULES [5 Exam Questions - 5 Groups]. What that means is that your examination is going to have 5 questions out of this section. You will also notice that there are five groups in this subsection. One question will be taken out of each of the groups in the subsection. Once you understand how that works, it makes it easier to plan your studies and especially your review before taking the real test. We are also going to talk about some of the best radios for
HF operation, and we will cover accessibility features.
There is a lot of fun out there on the HF bands, just waiting for you! Again, please email me at handiham@couragecenter.org
if you have any questions. Let us
know when you pass your exam, too. Happy
studying! Patrick Tice |
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