On 30 Jan 2026, James Goble said the following...
Re: Just saying Hello to the
By: Daryl Stout to phigan on Tue Jan 27 2026 10:11 pm
How long does it typically take to get this license? To become a ham
radio op that is.
a technician's license is really easy to get .. and in fact a lot of people
do get them (perhaps unwanted lol) because of insistance from an SO or someone else.
there are only 35 questions.. some of the questions are *extremely* easy. and they're multiple choice. some of the choices are obviously wrong, leaving you with something like a 50/50 shot on a lot of them.
if you know the FCC is responsible for radio communications in the USA and you get that question, you've got one right answer..
by extension, if the FCC is responsible for licensing, from whom do you think you'll get an email to download your printable license from? (the FCC doesn't mail anything anymore.. they're cheap as heck)
some of them you might not know off hand but are easy to remember.. something happened just before they sent you that email.. they put your license in the ULS database.. so what proves you have a license, if they don't care whether you have a printed license or not? when you search the ULS database and your license is there :)
there are a lot of questions about the rules, but you'll probably be interested in them anyways.. like where beacons are allowed (if you can hear the beacons that means there's probably good radio propagation toward/from where the beacon is, etc) or how repeater frequencies are chosen (you have things like repeater councils that coordinate them so they don't interfere with each other.. and you might get to know a lot of those people or want to run a repeater yourself someday)
anyways.. imo the time isn't very long. if you mostly retain stuff you read, it's not very complicated where i think you'll be studying that hard. they offer ham-in-a-day classes at hamfests and fully expect you to pass.
you'll probably wait longer for the license to show up in the database than you did studying..
Also, try to avoid paying somebody to take the test if you can:
https://larc-vec.org/home.php
it really rubs me the wrong way when your first interaction with your local hams is handing some dude $40 for no reason
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