In my last blog post, I had a comment from Tom a future ham and he asked me the question posted below. Since I am in Canada and my expertise is not the U.S. band plan for a technician class licence (or any other U.S. licence class for that matter) I asked him if I could start a new post featuring his question.
The floor is your Tom...
Hello. I thought this may be a place to get an answer. First, I am taking the test in September for my technician license. I am a CB operator and want to get into the ham world. Navy vet, electrical engineer, love radios and antenna theory. I am struggling with something. I really respect the knowledge of the amateur radio group. My struggle is understanding where the technician can operate. Google searches, YouTube searches, ARRL, Practice Tests, have yielded me the following:
1) Only HF
2) HF and some bands of VHF
3) Only 10-meters in HF
4) ARRL band plan shows more
5) HF and some bands of VFH, UHF.
Arrrgggg!!! I look at dates when I read things. This question is all over the place. Can one of you experts in here shed some light on this? Did something change? I understand the pool of questions for technician is now new as of July so maybe something changed….
Thanks for any help!!
– A future ham, Tom
In advance, I would like to thank those who contribute to answering Tom's question. I am also sure we all wish him the best as he writes in September for his Technician licence.
2 comments:
There are parts to the answer to this question that will actually be on the test. As a Technician, Tom will have the same privileges on VHF and higher as an Amateur Extra - no difference. That means that for somebody who is only interested in operating VHF and up, there is no benefit to upgrading. As far as HF privileges go, those are spelled out on the ARRL frequency chart. There is always a limit to how much power a Technician can run vs a General or Amateur Extra license holder. And, on bands lower than 10m, it’s CW only. On 10m, a Technician can use SSB and data modes in addition to CW. The ARRL frequency chart can be downloaded from here: http://www.arrl.org/graphical-frequency-allocations
de Karl Heinz - K5KHK
Good morning Karl and thanks for taking the time to respond, very good info and for sure will help lead Tom in the right direction.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
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