Intermediate Topic Study
Study the Intermediate amateur radio licence exam one syllabus section at a time. Choose the sections to practise and see your accuracy in each.
What's on the Paper
- Licensing conditions and station identification: Supervising others, passing messages, avoiding interference, log keeping, remote control of your station, EMF thresholds, and the Intermediate Schedule 1.
- Technical aspects: The largest section: potential dividers, capacitors and inductors, RMS values, reactance, tuned circuits, filters, transistors and power supplies, with calculations throughout.
- Transmitters and receivers: Modulation depth, SSB, oscillator stability and DDS, harmonics, key clicks and chirp, superhet receivers, AGC and SDR, with amplifier efficiency sums.
- Feeders and antennas: Balanced feeder and characteristic impedance, choke baluns, Yagis and traps, front-to-back ratio and EIRP, standing waves, matching units and feeder loss.
- Propagation: Ground, space and sky waves, the D, E, F1 and F2 layers, sunspots, MUF and LUF, fading, sporadic E and multipath.
- Electromagnetic compatibility: Interference effects and non-radio sources, direct pickup, common and differential mode, filters and ferrite rings, RF earths and vehicle installations.
- Good operating practices and procedures: Call sign prefixes, contests and awards, band plans, Q codes, computer-based modes, satellites and Doppler shift, and operating abroad.
- Safety: Charged capacitors, fuse ratings, live working, battery hazards, tools, EMF compliance distances at 100 W, and static.
- Measurements and construction: Using multimeters, analogue and digital displays, decibels (dBW, dBi and dBd), the resistor colour code, screening and soldering.