Amateur Radio License Exam on Stanford Campus

This is the old page from the radio exam which was in 2014.
For information about current radio exams, please check the website of the Stanford Amateur Radio Club or see the links below for informatin about other test-centers where you can currently register.

The Stanford Amateur Radio Club (Stanford ARC W6YX) plans to offer amateur radio license exams
on December 2, 2014
starting at 07:30pm
in [EXACT PLACE WILL BE ANNOUCED TO REGISTERED PARTICIPANTS], Stanford CA 94305, USA.

This license exam is primarily intended for the students who are attending Prof. John Pauly's class.
Other people are also welcomed to take this amateur radio license exam. They should contact Wolfgang, AG6MZ, http://nitsche.mobi (prefeareable 48 hours or more before the exam via e-mail) to register.

What to bring

The exam will be organized in cooperation with the American Radio Relay League, and their webpage at
http://www.arrl.org/what-to-bring-to-an-exam-session
explains which documents and other material you have to bring on the test date in order to take the exam.

Question pool

The amateur radio exam consists of multiple choice questions. The questions which you have to answer will be chosen from the official question pools.
The entire question pools which contain all possible questions and answers can be downloaded for free from
http://www.ncvec.org/
(In the exam, the answers might be listed in randomized order. This means if the correct answer to some question is labeled as answer number A in the question pool, it might also be labeled as B, C or D in the exam. So it is not helpful to memorize the letters corresponding to the correct answers...)
Beginning with July 1, 2014, the new (2014-2018) question pool will be used for element 2.
There are three question pools corresoopnding to exam elements 2, 3 and 4. (Element 1 was the Morse-code exam which is no longer required.)
In order to get the Technicial class license, you only need to pass the exam element 2.
For the General class license, you need to pass the additional exam element 3, and for the Extra class license, you also need to pass the exam in element 4.

Taking several exam elements

If you pass the exam in element 2, you can immediately afterwards try to take element 3. This is risk-free, because you do not have to pay any additional fee to take several elements in the same exam session, and even if you fail the more advanced element, you do not loose the credit for the previous element which you already passed.
In the same way, if you pass the exam in element 3, you can immediately afterwards try to take element 4.
This means it is also possible to take all three elements at the same exam session, with paying only a single test fee.

Repeating the exam

If you fail the exam, you may immediately repeat it during the same test session (provided that we have enough test-forms left). However to repeat the exam, you have to pay the registration fee a second time.
But due to the limited test-supplies which we have, you can not try the same exam element at our test-center three or more times at a single day. Therefore if you want to repeat an element after failing it twice, you can try it either at a later test date which we might offer, or at a different test-center. This way, you can repeat it as often as you want.

Other test centers

There are also several other test centers in the vicinity of Stanford, and many of them offer tests on a regular schedule (typically several times a month). For example the Silicon Valley VE Group www.svve.org offers tests in Saratoga (28 km south of Stanford), and the Sunnyvale VEC ARC www.amateur-radio.org offers tests in Redwood City and Sunnyvale. You can also find additional test centers with the ARRL search form www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session.

Additional Material


For questions, comments and corrections, please contact: Wolfgang H. Nitsche, AG6MZ <http://nitsche.mobi>