What the Upgrade Actually Gets You
A Technician license is essentially a VHF/UHF license: full privileges above 50 MHz, plus a narrow foothold on 10 meters. That is enough for local repeaters, emergency work, and satellites, but it depends on infrastructure or line-of-sight. General changes the physics available to you. HF signals refract off the ionosphere and come back down hundreds or thousands of miles away, so a General licensee with a wire in a tree can work another continent directly.
Passing Element 3 requires no additional exam beyond the 35-question test, and there is no Morse code requirement — that was dropped in 2007. The license term and renewal rules are the same as Technician: a ten-year term, renewable starting 90 days before expiration, with a two-year grace period if it lapses. Your call sign does not change automatically when you upgrade, though a General is eligible to apply for a shorter Group C ("1×3") vanity call sign.
Frequency Privileges
This table is the single most exam-relevant thing on this page. Four bands — 80, 40, 20 and 15 meters — have segments reserved for Amateur Extra and Advanced licensees where a General may not transmit at all. The other bands are available to a General in full. Frequencies are in MHz.
| Band | CW / RTTY / Data | Phone / Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 160 m | 1.800 – 2.000 | 1.800 – 2.000 | Entire band |
| 80 / 75 m | 3.525 – 3.600 | 3.800 – 4.000 | Extra/Advanced segments in between |
| 60 m | Channelized — see the note below | USB, 2.8 kHz max | |
| 40 m | 7.025 – 7.125 | 7.175 – 7.300 | No privileges 7.125 – 7.175 |
| 30 m | 10.100 – 10.150 | not permitted | 200 W PEP max; no phone or image |
| 20 m | 14.025 – 14.150 | 14.225 – 14.350 | Extra/Advanced segments in between |
| 17 m | 18.068 – 18.110 | 18.110 – 18.168 | Entire band |
| 15 m | 21.025 – 21.200 | 21.275 – 21.450 | Extra/Advanced segments in between |
| 12 m | 24.890 – 24.930 | 24.930 – 24.990 | Entire band |
| 10 m | 28.000 – 28.300 | 28.300 – 29.700 | Entire band |
| 6 m and up | All amateur allocations | Same as Technician | |
Power Limits
The general rule is to use the minimum power necessary to carry out the communication, with a ceiling of 1500 watts PEP. Two exceptions matter for the exam: 30 meters is capped at 200 watts PEP, and 60 meters has its own much lower limit.
Band Edges
Never set your carrier exactly at a band edge. Your emission — including modulation sidebands — must stay entirely inside your privileges, so on lower sideband you must be at least 3 kHz above the lower edge, and on upper sideband at least 3 kHz below the upper edge. Dial calibration error and drift argue for more margin still.
Secondary Status
On some band segments the Amateur Service is secondary, meaning non-amateur stations have priority there. You may operate, but you must not interfere with the primary users, and you have no protection from them.
Two Rules That Changed After This Pool Was Written
The 2023–2027 question pool was frozen before two FCC actions landed. NCVEC responded by withdrawing the affected questions rather than rewriting them, which is why nine questions are missing from the pool and from the practice tests here. Study the current rules; you will not be tested on the old ones.
Symbol rate limits are gone
Effective January 8, 2024, the FCC removed the old baud-rate caps on HF data (300 baud on most bands, 1200 baud on 10 meters) and replaced them with a single 2.8 kHz maximum bandwidth. This is what retired questions G1C08, G1C09 and G1C10.
60 meters was reconfigured
The FCC adopted the worldwide 5351.5–5366.5 kHz allocation at a much lower power limit, while keeping four of the five legacy channels (5332, 5348, 5373 and 5405 kHz) at their previous 100 W ERP. The old channel 3 falls inside the new band and drops to the new low limit. This retired G1A04.
Commission Rules (G1)
Control Operator & Privileges
The control operator's license class sets what a station may do, not the station owner's. A General may never act as control operator in an Extra-only segment except in a genuine emergency involving immediate safety of life or property. The station licensee and the control operator are jointly responsible for proper operation.
Remote & Automatic Control
Any amateur station may be remotely controlled. Under remote control the operator is still directly responsible in real time; under automatic control — used by repeaters and some digital stations — no operator is present at the control point, and the rules restrict which bands and modes qualify.
Third Party & International
You may pass messages for a non-licensed third party only with countries that have a third-party agreement with the U.S. International communications must relate to the purposes of the Amateur Service or be personal remarks — not business, and not one-way broadcasting.
Testing & Beacons
Test transmissions still require identification. A beacon is a one-way transmission for propagation study; a station may run only one beacon per band from a given location, and beacon power is capped at 100 watts PEP. Encoding a message to obscure its meaning is prohibited except for control commands to space stations or model craft.
Operating Procedures (G2)
Below 10 MHz, amateurs use lower sideband; above 10 MHz, upper sideband. The exception worth memorizing is 60 meters, where USB is required regardless. On a crowded band, a narrower transmit bandwidth and a well-adjusted speech processor do more for readability than more power.
A rare DX station often works "split" — listening on a different frequency than it transmits on — so a pileup does not bury its own signal. Sending only your call sign, waiting, and listening to the DX station's instructions is both good manners and more effective than calling continuously.
FT8 uses fixed 15-second transmit/receive slots and works far below the noise floor, which is why it dominates weak-signal HF. PSK31 is a narrow keyboard-to-keyboard mode; RTTY uses frequency-shift keying. Winlink relays email over radio when the internet is unavailable.
In a directed net, transmit only when the net control station calls on you, unless you are reporting an emergency. A formal radiogram carries a preamble with the information needed to track it, and the "check" in the header is the word count of the message text.
When immediate safety of human life or protection of property is at stake, a station may use any means of radiocommunication at its disposal, including frequencies outside its normal privileges. RACES participation additionally requires certification of enrollment by a civil defense organization.
The FCC no longer requires a station log, but most operators keep one anyway — awards, QSLing and troubleshooting all depend on it. Confirmations travel by paper card, by bureau, or electronically through systems like Logbook of The World.
Radio Wave Propagation (G3)
The ionosphere is layered, and the layers behave differently. The D region, lowest and only present in daylight, mostly absorbs — which is why 160, 80 and 40 meters are short-range by day and open up dramatically after sunset. The E region supports hops of roughly 1,200 miles. The F region is highest and does the heavy lifting for long-distance work; it splits into F1 and F2 during the day and merges at night, and a single F2 hop can cover about 2,500 miles.
Two numbers bracket what is usable at any moment. The maximum usable frequency (MUF) is the highest frequency that will refract back to a given destination; go above it and your signal passes into space. The lowest usable frequency (LUF) is the point below which D-region absorption swallows the signal. When the LUF exceeds the MUF, no frequency works on that path at all. The critical frequency is the highest frequency that reflects straight back when sent vertically, and it sets the MUF for a given angle.
Solar activity drives all of it. A higher solar flux index and higher sunspot numbers ionize the F region more strongly, raising the MUF and opening 15, 12 and 10 meters. The same solar activity also produces geomagnetic storms that can wipe out polar paths for days. Other mechanisms fill the gaps: sporadic E gives sudden strong openings on 10 and 6 meters, scatter modes fill the skip zone with weak, distorted signals, and near-vertical incidence skywave (NVIS) — a low horizontal antenna on 40 or 80 meters — deliberately fires straight up to blanket the region out to a few hundred miles with no skip zone.
Electrical Principles (G5)
Inductive reactance rises with frequency; capacitive reactance falls with it. Impedance combines resistance and reactance, and is written Z, with reactance written X. At resonance the two reactances are equal and cancel: a series LC circuit then shows minimum impedance, a parallel LC circuit maximum.
For a sine wave, RMS voltage is 0.707 × peak, and peak is 1.414 × RMS. Power is E²/R. For an unmodulated carrier, PEP equals average power. Decibels are a ratio: +3 dB doubles power, +6 dB quadruples it, +10 dB is ten times, and one S unit is 6 dB.
Voltage scales with the turns ratio, and impedance scales with the square of the turns ratio. To match two impedances, the required turns ratio is the square root of the impedance ratio — matching 1200 ohms to 50 ohms, for instance, needs a ratio near 4.9:1.
Components and Practical Circuits (G6, G7)
General-level component knowledge is mostly about picking the right part and reading a schematic. Zener diodes regulate voltage by conducting in reverse at a fixed breakdown point. Varactor diodes are used as voltage-controlled capacitors, which is how a modern rig tunes without a mechanical variable capacitor. Field-effect transistors present very high input impedance; bipolar transistors are current-controlled. Toroidal cores confine their magnetic field almost entirely within the core, so they can be mounted close to other components without coupling into them.
On the circuit side, a linear power supply runs the AC line through a transformer, a rectifier, a filter capacitor and a regulator; a switchmode supply chops the input at a high frequency instead, which makes it far lighter but a potential noise source. Amplifier classes trade efficiency against linearity — Class A is the most linear and least efficient, Class C the reverse and unsuitable for SSB. The single schematic in this question pool, Figure G7-1, shows an oscillator followed by a transformer-coupled amplifier, and the five questions about it simply ask you to identify numbered symbols.
Signals and Emissions (G8)
Modulation & Bandwidth
SSB voice occupies roughly 3 kHz, AM about 6 kHz, and FM considerably more — Carson's rule puts an FM signal's bandwidth at twice the sum of deviation and highest modulating frequency. CW is only a few hundred hertz wide at most. Narrower is not automatically better; it is a trade against fidelity.
Splatter and Spurs
Overdriving a transmitter — too much mic gain, too much speech processing, or an overdriven amplifier — produces intermodulation distortion, which shows up on the air as splatter well outside your intended bandwidth. Harmonics are integer multiples of your operating frequency; spurious emissions are anything else unintended.
Antennas and Feed Lines (G9)
Two formulas carry most of the arithmetic. A half-wave dipole is roughly 468 / f feet long, and a quarter-wave vertical roughly 234 / f feet, with f in MHz. A dipole in free space feeds at about 70 ohms; bringing it closer to ground lowers that, and bending it into an inverted V lowers it further, toward the 50 ohms most equipment expects.
Height controls the radiation angle, and radiation angle controls what you can work. A horizontal antenna less than about a half wavelength up fires most of its energy nearly straight up — excellent for regional NVIS contacts, poor for DX. Raise it and the main lobe drops toward the horizon. Vertical antennas radiate at low angles naturally, which favors DX, but they need a good radial system to work against.
On feed lines: loss rises with frequency and with SWR, and every bit of that loss becomes heat. An antenna tuner does not reduce SWR on the feed line itself — it presents the transmitter a load it can work into, while the standing waves between tuner and antenna remain. Gain figures come in two flavors that differ by a constant: dBi is referenced to an isotropic radiator, dBd to a dipole, and dBi = dBd + 2.15.
Electrical and RF Safety (G0)
RF Exposure
Every amateur station must now be evaluated against the FCC's maximum permissible exposure limits. The limits are frequency-dependent — the body absorbs RF most efficiently in the VHF range, so the allowed exposure is lowest there. Exposure is averaged over time, which is why duty cycle matters: a mode that transmits continuously produces far more average exposure than one that does not. Distance is the most effective control you have.
Grounding & Lightning
All ground rods and building grounds must be bonded together, or a lightning strike will find a difference of potential to arc across. Grounding conductors should run short and straight — sharp bends present inductance to a fast strike current. Flat copper strap beats round wire for RF bonding. Tower and antenna grounding requirements come from local electrical codes, not from Part 97.
Key Takeaways
- 1. General adds substantial privileges on every HF band; 80, 40, 20 and 15 meters are the four with segments still closed to you.
- 2. 1500 W PEP is the ceiling, but 30 meters is capped at 200 W and is CW/data only.
- 3. LSB below 10 MHz, USB above — and USB always on 60 meters.
- 4. The D region absorbs by day; the F region carries DX, and solar activity sets the MUF.
- 5. Dipole ≈ 468/f feet, quarter-wave vertical ≈ 234/f feet, dBi = dBd + 2.15.
- 6. Antenna height sets radiation angle: low for regional NVIS, high for DX.