Amateur radio, from licence to on the air
Get licensed, then build a station that actually works
Four complete station builds with every line item priced and linked, the three license exams explained in full, and calculators for the numbers you cannot guess at: antenna length, coax loss, SWR, battery runtime and RF exposure distance.
- Entry cost
- Under $400 complete
- Technician exam
- 35 questions
- FCC fee
- $35, ten years
- Morse code
- Not required
Step one
The license comes first, and it is smaller than it looks
There is no Morse code requirement, no interview and no equipment prerequisite. Three written exams, all multiple choice, all drawn from a published question pool you can read in advance. Most people pass the first one after ten to fifteen hours of study. Receiving needs no license at all, so you can listen while you learn.
- 35 questions, 26 to pass Technician Everything above 50 MHz at full power, plus a narrow slice of HF. Ten to fifteen hours of study for most people.
- 35 questions, 26 to pass General Most of every HF band including the phone segments. This is the one that makes worldwide contacts routine.
- 50 questions, 37 to pass Amateur Extra Every frequency the amateur service holds in the United States, including the exclusive segments where the rare DX listens.
Step two
Four complete stations, every line priced
Buying gear one piece at a time is how people end up with a radio and no way to get an antenna in the air. These are entire stations, in the order to buy them, with a stated total at the bottom of each list.
- Beginner Under $400Technician starter station A handheld, a whip that works, an outdoor vertical and the coax to feed it. The antenna costs more than the radio, which is the whole lesson.
- Intermediate Under $2,000First HF station A hundred watts, an end fed half wave in a tree, an automatic tuner, a real power supply and a bonded entry panel.
- Expert Under $6,000Full HF base station Spectrum scope, 600 W amplifier, rotatable beams on a guyed mast, rotator, and a lightning system worth the station behind it.
- Separate path Under $1,200Portable field kit Ten watts, a wire in a tree, a lithium pack and a way to carry all of it up a hill. Not a smaller home station.
The numbers
Calculators for the things you cannot eyeball
Antenna length, feedline loss and RF exposure distance are arithmetic, not opinion. Every tool here shows its formula and the band chart behind it, so the answer survives being written on the back of an envelope in a field.
- Dipole length 468 / f, per leg and tip to tip
- Quarter-wave vertical Radiator plus a radial field
- End fed half wave One support, one transformer
- Coax loss By type, length and frequency
- SWR and reflected power What the meter is really telling you
- RF exposure distance The evaluation the FCC requires
- Battery runtime Hours from a pack, by duty cycle
- Power supply sizing Amps the station actually draws
Read these before you build anything
Three things in this hobby genuinely hurt people
Amateur radio is a safe hobby with three sharp edges, and all three are avoidable with information you can read in twenty minutes. None of them is about the radio.
- Antenna and mast safety Contact with an overhead power line is the most common fatal accident in this hobby, and it happens during the raising.
- RF exposure evaluation The FCC requires one from every amateur station. There is no power level that excuses you from running the numbers.
- Grounding and lightning protection A life-safety and fire-safety system covered by the National Electrical Code, not an accessory that improves your signal.
How to actually do it
Guides that assume nothing
The step between owning equipment and using it is where most new operators stall. These are written for someone holding a radio they have not keyed yet.
- Choosing a first HF antenna
- How to use a repeater
- Programming a Baofeng with CHIRP
- Making your first HF contact
- HF propagation, in plain terms
- Getting started with FT8
All guides | Reference charts | Side-by-side comparisons | Gear roundups
How this site works
Every product recommendation here is researched from published manufacturer specifications, FCC regulatory documents, 47 CFR Part 97 itself and verified owner reviews read at volume. We do not claim hands-on testing we have not done, and we say so on every page. Product links are affiliate links, which is how the site is paid for, and they never change which product we name first. Several genuinely best-in-class items in amateur radio come from small manufacturers who sell only from their own stores; those are still named here, with the button running a category search for comparable gear rather than pretending the exact item is stocked. See the affiliate disclosure for the full picture, and the safety page for the short version of the three things that matter.
