Thursday, June 03, 2010

New Technician Pool, coming soon to a VE team near you

The NCVEC announced a new Technician pool back in February; it's now June and that new pool goes into effect July 1.  I've been blogging about the old Technician pool (an activity which, of late, I have been kinda lax at), and I've decided to abandon that effort in favor of blogging about the new pool, on the grounds that that might be more useful.

The new pool has 396 questions, 5 more than the old one; there are 67 questions carried across unchanged, 142 carried across with some changes (either minor or, in some cases, major), and 187 questions that are entirely new.  182 questions were dropped.  I would say that this new pool is somewhat harder than the old one; the new pool has significantly more electronics on it as well as content related to ionospheric propagation and SSB and CW operations (reflecting the fact that all Technicians now get limited HF privileges, not just those few who pass a code test).  There's even a few basic antenna theory questions.  Overall I think this is a better pool, in that it will force candidates to learn more of what they should know as beginning amateur radio operators.

Future posts will discuss specific topics that are new or newly handled on the new pool.

No comments:

Post a Comment