There are three classes of ham radio licenses granted by the FCC, technician, general and extra.
Each class has privileges in addition to the class of license below it.
To be granted a license, a prospective ham operator has to pass a license exam that is
administered by volunteer license coordinators, (a VEC team). To move on to the next higher class of license,
you must first pass the license exam below. Exams are in the order technician, general, and finally extra.
The exams contain questions about radio theory and amateur radio operations.
The question pools for the examinations are publicly available. The question pool for each exam can be located at the following links:
Technician
General
Extra
The question pools are divided into subelements covering different amateur radio topics. Each subelement is divided into groups of questions. When an exam is administered, one question is randomly selected from each group and used on the exam.
The
free practice exams here at Copasetic Flows are constructed in the same manner.
To learn more about amateur radio in general, check out the
Amateur
Radio Relay League’s site. From there you can find a
license exam in your area, as well as
amateur radio clubs in
your area.