About BandPass Academy
BandPass Academy is a free study site for the three United States amateur radio licence examinations: Technician, General and Amateur Extra. It is run by a small group of licensed operators who got tired of answer keys without reasoning, and who wanted a place where a wrong answer explains why it was wrong and points at the rule or the arithmetic that settles it.
What a study unit is
Every page on this site is one study unit: ten questions on a single chapter, wrapped in a short briefing, a reference sheet of explanations and a citation for each question. Units are published on a schedule rather than all at once, because a small amount of material that is actually read beats a 300-question dump that nobody finishes.
The chapters follow the shape of the licence classes rather than the shape of a commercial course:
| Track | Chapters | Units | Questions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technician | 7 | 11 | 110 |
| General | 6 | 10 | 100 |
| Amateur Extra | 5 | 10 | 100 |
How the material is written
Each question is written from a syllabus line, not from a question pool. That matters for two reasons. First, the official pools are revised on a multi-year cycle, and a site that copies them goes stale the moment the pool changes; a site that teaches the underlying rule does not. Second, the exam itself rewords the pool questions, so recognising a sentence is a poor substitute for knowing that a half-wave dipole in feet is 468 divided by the frequency in megahertz.
Where a question has a number in it, the number is worked through in the explanation. Where a question is about a rule, the rule is named precisely enough to look up - "47 CFR §97.119(b)(2)" rather than "the FCC says so". The explanations were drafted by licensed operators and checked against the current text of Part 97 and the FCC's RF exposure guidance (OET Bulletin 65) at the time of publication.
Corrections
Radio regulation changes, and so do band plans and question pools. If a unit on this site contradicts the current rules, the unit is wrong and we want to fix it. Write to [email protected] with the unit title and, if you have it, a citation. Corrections are applied to both the English and Chinese versions of a unit, and the publication date at the head of the page is left alone so you can see when the material entered the site.
What this site is not
BandPass Academy is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Federal Communications Commission, the NCVEC, ARRL, or any volunteer examiner team. Nothing here is a licence, a legal opinion or an official examination. Study units are teaching material; the exam you sit is written by other people, and the rules you must follow are the ones in the current Code of Federal Regulations.
You can reach a human at [email protected]. We are volunteers, so allow a few days for a reply.