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hamexam

Practice tests for the United States amateur radio licence exams

What it does

Presents randomly drawn questions from the FCC amateur radio question pools -- Technician, General and Extra -- in the same proportions the real exam uses, marks the result, and tracks which subelements you are weak in.

Why you would want it

The US exams are drawn verbatim from published pools, so practising against the pool is not a shortcut, it is the intended method. Working through them offline, without an account or a subscription, is what this offers.

Before it will work

None. It is a study tool with no radio involved.

How it installs

  • apt: hamexam

Known problems

The question pool built into a package version is the pool at the time it was packaged. Pools are revised on a rolling cycle and Mint 22.3 carries 1.10.1 against 1.11.2 elsewhere (measured 2026-08-28) -- check the pool year against the current one before trusting a score. It covers the US exams only; canadian-ham-exam is the Canadian equivalent and other countries have neither.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade
  • The FCC question pools are revised on a rolling four-year cycle, one element at a time. A package version behind a pool revision is studying the wrong questions, which matters more here than a version gap usually does.

Where to get help with the software itself

Debian declares no upstream Homepage; the tracker is the honest pointer rather than an invented one.

Source: catalog/packages/hamexam.yaml