Monday, April 29, 2013

Survey of practice radio tests

In the course of upgrading for my amateur radio license, I've come across several Amateur Radio test preparation tools. In this, I hope to give some details about each of them, and in general, review them. This list includes both online tests and Android programs.

Eham.net - This meets the basic qualification for a practice test. All figures show up, it has all of the questions, and it is in the correct format. It isn't really anything special, but it does work to allow you to practice the test. I used this as a "Final Test" when I was pretty sure I was ready to take the test, but not 100% certain.

aa9pw - This test is a bit more advanced than eham. Taking the test is exactly the same way, however, the results from the test are quite nice. It groups the questions into areas of focus. Thus, you can easily see what areas you are doing well on, and what areas you need to focus on. It even gives you study questions. This is the best online test program that I've seen.

Ham Test Prep - This is an Android test, which is quite interesting. I used this as my primary means to study for the General and Extra test. It includes all of the test questions, and overall is great. It allows you to try your second best guess, and thus helps you to build an intuition as to which one is correct. However, there is a few issues. The primary issue is there are sometimes missing figures, which is really annoying... Also, it only allows you to do practice tests, it doesn't do anything else. Overall, I would recommend it for the General and Amateur Extra, but I would pass for the technician, due to the missing figures.

Amateur Radio Exams 1.0 FREE This is another Android program. It works great, has lots of practice modes, but it only has the technician question, you have to pay for the better version. Overall, it seems like a nice program, however.

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