2026-04-28 On Taking the Amateur Radio Full Licence Exam
Yesterday I took, and provisionally [1] passed, the RSGB’s Amateur Radio Full Licence Examination.
This has been something I wanted to do for some time - I passed my Intermediate back in ~2012 thanks to Martin G3ZAY’s assistance, but the Full is a significant step up in terms of challenge level.
What finally got me over the hurdle was the release of the question bank. On April 17 2026 the RSGB announced that they were making all the questions in the Full exam available online, via a really nice web interface put together by Aubrey M8AUB: https://rsgb.services/public/exams/eqdb/. Crucially for me, this made it incredibly easy to actually generate and take sample mock exams, which helped me realise I was closer than I thought.
Something that put me off taking the Full originally was being conscious of all the bits I didn’t fully understand. I went into the Intermediate pretty comfortable with the whole syllabus, but when it came to the Full, I knew I wasn’t great at wrangling impedance matching, modulation, decibel calculation, and basically anything involving transistors(!). However when I tried taking a few mocks with Aubrey’s tool, it turned out that I still knew enough to do fairly well - certainly enough to get me over the 60% pass mark with consistency. So, I booked myself in to the earliest available test date, crammed in what revision I could manage between client work and childcare, and kept taking mocks to track my progress.
Another thing that was a little off-putting was the exam logistics. My 2012 exams were in person, thanks to Martin and other volunteers - I just needed to turn up with pen and calculator. Now the exams are largely done online - and while this brings a whole bunch of improvements in terms of accessibility etc., it also means a bit of extra work in terms of candidate setup.
First off, you need to run the TestReach desktop app to take the test. This not only provides the basic infrastructure around actually doing the test, but also the monitoring and detection etc. that you need to mitigate attempts to cheat - e.g. monitoring window-switching and other things. This is far from unreasonable, but it’s a level and kind of systems access that I’d be wary of on a trusted personal computer. Unfortunately the TestReach app doesn’t run on Linux, and anything I did have that could run it wasn’t something I’d want to deal with wiping and restoring afterwards. Fortunately dad loaned me a spare laptop that ran Windows!
Second, you need two cameras, covering each other. This is another very reasonable anti-cheating measure - ensure that there’s not someone or something behind one camera that’s providing you information or similar - but I’d (honestly somewhat naïvely and foolishly) thought that this meant faffing with a double webcam setup and cabling for TestReach. In actual fact you can just use a smartphone as the second camera - the monitoring and recording is done through Zoom or similar, so you can just join a call both from the computer you’re doing the test on, and a conveniently-positioned phone behind/to the side of you, and voilà, two camera angles.
Ultimately, the whole exam process was so much less of a big deal than I first thought, from both the operational standpoint, and also in terms of how much I could get away with never remembering enough about FETs.
Massive thanks to everyone who helped get me over the line, notably:
Steve G4HSK for, well, everything
The fine folks of the Online Amateur Radio Community (OARC) for all the knowledge they’ve shared and questions they’ve answered
Aubrey M8AUB, Robin M0JQQ, and the folks at the RSGB for opening up the question bank which gave me the kick I needed to actually do this
Matt G4MER for invigilating my exam
Martin G3ZAY for getting me through the Foundation and Intermediate beforehand