General License Study Guide

The General license expands your operating privileges into the HF bands, giving you the ability to communicate across states, countries, and continents.

This guide explains the concepts behind every major topic you’ll encounter at the General level, including HF operating practices, propagation, electrical principles, digital modes, antennas, and the rules that govern expanded privileges.

Each lesson focuses on understanding the material, not memorizing answers. You’ll learn how HF signals behave, how to operate effectively on crowded bands, how to manage interference, and how to use more advanced station equipment.

At the end of each lesson, you’ll see every question that may appear on the exam for that topic. If you choose an incorrect answer, you’ll be guided to the exact section you need to review.

G0 Safety

These lessons cover RF exposure, routine station evaluation, grounding, electrical safety, fusing, interlocks, wiring, antennas, and tower safety.

G1 Commission’s Rules

These lessons explain General class privileges, frequency allocations, power limits, operating restrictions, control categories, repeaters, third-party rules, and digital station control.

G2 Operating Procedures

Learn phone procedures, HF operating practices, CW procedures, digital mode operation, emergency operations, band plans, and effective on-air communication.

G3 Radio Wave Propagation

These lessons explain solar activity, geomagnetic effects, MUF, LUF, ionospheric regions, critical angle, scatter, and NVIS propagation.

G4 Amateur Radio Practices

Learn about station configuration, test equipment, interference reduction, grounding, speech processors, S meters, mobile HF, portable operation, and alternative energy.

G5 Electrical Principles

These lessons explain reactance, inductance, capacitance, impedance, resonance, decibels, current dividers, voltage dividers, RMS values, PEP, transformers, and series-parallel circuits.

G6 Circuit Components

These lessons cover resistors, capacitors, inductors, rectifiers, diodes, transistors, vacuum tubes, batteries, integrated circuits, RF connectors, ferrite cores, and display devices.

G7 Practical Circuits

These lessons explain power supplies, schematic symbols, digital circuits, amplifiers, oscillators, transceiver design, filters, and digital signal processing.

G8 Signals and Emissions

Learn about carriers, modulation, AM, FM, single sideband, digital modulation, overmodulation, bandwidth, frequency changing, deviation, intermodulation, and digital emissions.

G9 Antennas and Feed Lines

These lessons explain feed lines, characteristic impedance, attenuation, SWR, antenna matching, dipoles, monopoles, directional antennas, and specialized antenna applications.