What Extra Adds
An Extra licensee has every privilege the Amateur Service has. In practice that means four HF bands open up at the bottom edge, where a General licensee has to stop. These are the segments below; everything else you already had as a General.
| Band | CW / RTTY / Data gained | Phone / Image gained |
|---|---|---|
| 80 / 75 m | 3.500 – 3.525 | 3.600 – 3.800 |
| 40 m | 7.000 – 7.025 | 7.125 – 7.175 |
| 20 m | 14.000 – 14.025 | 14.150 – 14.225 |
| 15 m | 21.000 – 21.025 | 21.200 – 21.275 |
Frequencies in MHz. Holders of the legacy Advanced class, no longer issued, already have part of the phone segments listed here.
Commission Rules E1
Running the Exam
A large share of E1 is about administering exams, because Extra licensees can become Volunteer Examiners for every class. Three VEs of the appropriate class must observe and certify each session, they are accountable to a VEC for its proper conduct, and disqualified candidates still get their paperwork handled properly. Expect questions on who may accredit VEs and what happens when a session is administered improperly.
Station Restrictions
Antenna structures generally require FAA notification and FCC registration above 200 feet, or when near a public-use airport, with a slope-based limit close in. PRB-1 obliges local authorities to reasonably accommodate amateur antennas, but does not override every restriction. Quiet-zone protections apply near the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Special Operations
Spread spectrum, auxiliary and repeater stations, remote and automatic control, space stations and Earth stations all carry their own rule sets. Know which bands permit spread spectrum, who is accountable when an automatically controlled station retransmits a violation, and the notification requirements for a space station.
Operating Abroad
CEPT and IARP agreements let U.S. amateurs operate in participating countries without a separate licence, subject to the host country's rules and to identification requirements that reflect where you are. The reciprocal arrangements, and which class of U.S. licence they extend to, are examinable.
Operating Procedures E2
Satellite work is the centrepiece here. A satellite's mode is named by its uplink and downlink bands; a linear transponder relays a slice of spectrum and inverts it, so you tune the downlink backwards. Doppler shift is significant and grows with frequency. Spin fading comes from the satellite tumbling relative to your antenna's polarization, which is why circular polarization helps. Running excessive uplink power is the classic sin: the satellite's automatic gain control robs everyone else on the transponder.
Digital protocol detail steps up too. FT8 transmits in fixed 15-second slots and occupies about 50 Hz; PACTOR uses ARQ with a receiving station requesting retransmission of bad frames; packet and APRS carry their own addressing. Know the difference between forward error correction, which adds redundancy so errors can be repaired without a retry, and ARQ, which asks for the data again.
Image modes round it out: slow-scan television sends a still frame as audio tones over several seconds, with the frame's colour and timing set by the mode, while fast-scan amateur television uses several megahertz of bandwidth and is therefore confined to the higher bands.
Radio Wave Propagation E3
Path loss is enormous and varies with the moon's distance — perigee is worth a couple of dB over apogee. Libration fading is the flutter caused by the moon's apparent wobble scattering your signal off different parts of a rough surface. Best window is when the moon is visible to both stations, and the maximum useful separation is roughly half the Earth's circumference.
Meteor trails ionize the E region around 80–120 km and reflect VHF briefly — best on 6 metres, best near dawn. Aurora scatter smears a signal badly, so CW survives where SSB does not. Transequatorial propagation carries VHF a few thousand miles across the geomagnetic equator in the late afternoon and evening.
Solar flux is measured at 10.7 cm, i.e. 2800 MHz. The A and K indices describe geomagnetic disturbance, K being the short-term one. Higher flux raises the MUF; a geomagnetic storm can destroy polar paths outright. The radio horizon runs about 15% beyond the visual one, from the 4/3-Earth refraction model.
Amateur Practices E4
This subelement is about measuring things and about why receivers fall over. On the bench: an oscilloscope shows amplitude against time, a spectrum analyzer amplitude against frequency, and an antenna analyzer impedance against frequency. Each answers a different question, and the exam likes asking which instrument you would reach for.
Receiver performance is the harder half. Sensitivity is how weak a signal you can hear; selectivity is how well you reject the adjacent one. Blocking dynamic range is the gap between the noise floor and the level where a strong nearby signal desensitizes the receiver. Third-order intermodulation is the nasty one, because products at 2f1 − f2 land right in the passband and grow three decibels for every one decibel of input. Reciprocal mixing is local-oscillator phase noise mixing a strong adjacent signal into your passband, raising the apparent noise floor. Note the thermal noise reference: about −174 dBm in a 1 Hz bandwidth at room temperature.
Electrical Principles E5
Resonance and Q
Resonant frequency is f = 1 / (2π√(LC)). At resonance the reactances cancel, leaving a purely resistive impedance — minimum in a series circuit, maximum in a parallel one. Q sets how sharp that is: half-power bandwidth is simply f / Q, so a 7.1 MHz circuit with Q of 150 has a 47 kHz bandwidth.
Complex Impedance
Impedance is R + jX in rectangular form, or magnitude and phase angle in polar form, and Extra expects you to move between them. Phase angle is arctan(X/R). Net inductive reactance means current lags voltage; net capacitive means it leads. Admittance, susceptance and conductance are simply the reciprocals of impedance, reactance and resistance.
Time Constants
One RC time constant is τ = R × C, and in that time a capacitor charges to about 63.2% of the applied voltage or discharges to 36.8%. Five time constants is the usual "fully charged" convention. Watch the units: microfarads times megohms gives seconds.
Fields and Skin Effect
At RF, current flows only in a thin outer layer of a conductor, so effective resistance rises with frequency — which is why hollow tubing works as well as solid rod, and why silver plating helps. Real power is dissipated as heat; reactive power is stored and returned each cycle and does no work.
Components and Circuits E6, E7
E6 is semiconductor physics at a working level: what makes N-type and P-type material, why a MOSFET's insulated gate gives it near-infinite input impedance and also makes it vulnerable to static, what a PIN diode's low junction capacitance makes it good for (RF switching), and where varactors, Schottky diodes and hot-carrier diodes each belong. Digital logic families, display technologies and optoisolators all appear. Several questions simply ask you to identify a numbered schematic symbol from a chart, which is free marks if you have looked at the figures.
E7 puts those parts into circuits. Amplifier classes trade linearity against efficiency — Class A most linear, Class C most efficient and unusable for SSB. Filter families have personalities: Butterworth is maximally flat, Chebyshev trades passband ripple for steeper skirts, elliptic adds stopband notches. Linear regulators dissipate the difference between input and output as heat, switching regulators chop instead and are far more efficient but noisier. Op-amp questions are arithmetic: in the inverting configuration the gain magnitude is simply RF / R1 and the output is inverted, and putting a capacitor across the feedback resistor turns it into a low-pass filter. Software-defined radio brings sampling: your sample rate must exceed twice the highest frequency present, and the number of bits sets the dynamic range.
Signals and Emissions E8
Modulation Arithmetic
Modulation index is deviation divided by the modulating frequency; deviation ratio is peak deviation divided by the highest modulating frequency. A keyed CW signal's bandwidth runs about 4 × WPM in hertz, so 13 words per minute occupies roughly 52 Hz. For FSK, add the shift to 1.2 times the baud rate.
Waveforms and Digital
Any periodic waveform decomposes into a fundamental plus harmonics; a square wave carries odd harmonics, a sawtooth both odd and even. Peak-to-average power ratio matters for how hard you can drive an amplifier. On the digital side, know why error correction costs bandwidth, and what a symbol rate is as distinct from a bit rate.
Antennas and Transmission Lines E9
The largest subelement, and the most rewarding. Gain is quoted two ways that differ by a constant: dBi = dBd + 2.15. Effective radiated power is transmitter power adjusted for feed line loss and antenna gain over a dipole; EIRP uses gain over an isotropic source instead. Reading a radiation pattern is an examinable skill in itself — 3 dB beamwidth is measured between the half-power points either side of the main lobe, front-to-back compares the peak with the response 180° away, front-to-side with the response at 90°.
Feed lines behave as transformers when they are not matched. A quarter-wave section inverts impedance, so it can match two different impedances if you choose its characteristic impedance as the geometric mean: Z = √(Z1 × Z2), which is how 100 ohms gets matched to 50 with a 75-ohm Q-section. A half-wave section repeats whatever is on the far end. Velocity factor shortens the physical length needed for a given electrical length. Shorted and open stubs of various lengths look like inductors, capacitors or resonant circuits, and the exam works through the combinations.
Then there is the Smith chart, which trips people up mostly because it looks alien. It is just two families of curves plotted on the reflection-coefficient plane: constant-resistance circles and constant-reactance arcs. The one straight line across it is the resistance axis, the big outer circle where the arcs terminate is the reactance axis, and the scales around the rim are marked in fractions of a wavelength so you can move along a transmission line by rotating around the centre.
Safety E0
A single group, entirely about RF exposure, and it is quantitative. Maximum permissible exposure limits depend on frequency, and they are lowest around 30–300 MHz because the human body is close to resonant there and absorbs most efficiently. Exposure is averaged over time — six minutes for controlled environments, thirty for uncontrolled — so duty cycle directly reduces average exposure. Specific absorption rate describes energy actually deposited in tissue. Power density falls with the square of distance, which makes separation the most effective mitigation available, and the near field cannot be calculated with the simple far-field formulas at all.
Key Formulas Worth Memorizing
- 1. Resonance f = 1 / (2π√(LC)), half-power bandwidth f / Q.
- 2. Phase angle arctan(X/R); inductive lags, capacitive leads.
- 3. RC time constant τ = R × C → 63.2% charged.
- 4. Inverting op-amp gain = RF / R1, output inverted.
- 5. dBi = dBd + 2.15.
- 6. Q-section match Z = √(Z1 × Z2).
- 7. Third-order IMD products at 2f1 − f2, rising 3 dB per dB.
- 8. Thermal noise floor −174 dBm in 1 Hz at room temperature.