Amateur Radio Basic Qualification Study Guide 2026

The Basic exam and your certificate

To operate an amateur radio station in Canada you need an Amateur Radio Operator Certificate. The first and most common qualification is the Basic Qualification. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) sets the rules and the question bank. Accredited examiners give the exam.

• The Basic exam has 100 questions, one from each of 100 topic areas.
• The pass mark is 70%. A score of 80% or more earns Basic with Honours.
• No time limit is set. Most people finish in about one hour, and an exam should normally not go past two hours.
• There is no age limit and no nationality limit. Bring photo ID.
• If you fail, you can try again as often as you need. Each retest uses a different exam.
• A new Basic exam took effect on July 15, 2025. ISED also gives a set of formulas and block diagrams that may be used during the exam.
• Your certificate is valid for life.

How to get your certificate

1. Study the syllabus in RIC-3 and practise with study questions.
2. Find an accredited examiner near you with the ISED examiner search.
3. Write the exam. The examiner sends your score to ISED.
4. ISED issues your certificate. You can then apply for a call sign.

Local radio clubs and technical schools can tell you who gives exams in your area. In some cases an examiner may give the exam orally, and candidates with a disability should talk to their examiner about their needs. Examiners may charge their own exam fee, which ISED does not set.

Qualifications and privileges

Each qualification adds privileges. The Basic qualification is required first. The others build on it.

Power limits

A Basic holder may assemble commercial kits of professional design and may reprogram a radio by computer. A Basic holder may not build a home-made transmitter or change a radio's circuits. Under the Radiocommunication Regulations, a transmitter or amplifier that is not commercially made, a repeater that retransmits in the same band, and a club station all need the Advanced qualification.

The rules you must follow

The main rules are in the Radiocommunication Regulations and in RBR-4, the operating standard for the amateur service. About a quarter of the exam is about rules and policies.

Who you may talk to and what you may say

• Talk only with other stations in the amateur radio service.
• Use only codes or ciphers that are not secret.
• Do not transmit music, commercially recorded material or broadcast programs.
• Do not use amateur radio for business or professional work.
• Never demand or accept payment of any kind for messages.
• In a real or simulated emergency, you may send messages for a person, a government or a relief organization.

Identification

Give your call sign in English or French at the start and end of each exchange, and at least every 30 minutes during a long contact.

Other rules

• A person with no certificate may take part in contacts while a qualified operator supervises.
• Canada does not prohibit international third-party messages, but the other country may. Emergency third-party messages are allowed unless the other country forbids them.
• In shared bands, amateurs must not cause interference to other services and are not protected from them.
• Below 30 MHz, unmodulated carriers are allowed only for brief tests.
• Tell ISED when your mailing address changes.

Operating practice

Good operating habits keep the bands friendly and avoid interference.

• Listen first and ask if a frequency is in use before you call.
• Use a dummy load when you tune or test, so you do not send a signal over the air.
• Use the ITU phonetic alphabet to spell call signs: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.
• On a repeater, pause between transmissions so others can break in, especially with emergency traffic.
• Keep a record of your contacts if you want to confirm them later.

Signal reports and Q signals

The RST system rates Readability (1 to 5), Strength (1 to 9) and Tone (1 to 9, for Morse code). Q signals are short codes used mostly in Morse.

Station equipment and safety

The exam asks about how radios are built in blocks and how to stay safe.

• A regulated power supply has a transformer, a rectifier, a filter and a regulator, in that order.
• AM changes the strength of the carrier. FM changes its frequency. SSB removes the carrier and one sideband, so it is narrow and efficient.
• An FM receiver uses a limiter to remove amplitude changes before the detector.
• Packet radio sends data in blocks with addresses and error checking.

Safety

• Unplug equipment and discharge capacitors before you work inside it.
• Replace a fuse with one of the same rating, never a larger one.
• Connect equipment cases to a safety ground.
• Charge lead-acid batteries where there is good airflow, because they can give off hydrogen.
• Ground your antenna and tower and disconnect feed lines when lightning is near.
• Wear a harness on a tower. People on the ground wear hard hats.
• Keep antennas high and away from people to limit RF exposure.

Electronics basics

You do not need to be an engineer, but you must handle simple numbers. ISED publishes a set of formulas and block diagrams to study, and an unlabelled copy may be used during the exam.

• Prefixes: kilo = 1000, mega = 1 000 000, milli = one thousandth, micro = one millionth. So 3.5 MHz = 3500 kHz.
• Capacitance is in farads, inductance in henries, resistance in ohms.
• A tuned circuit is resonant when inductive and capacitive reactance are equal.
• A diode passes current one way. A bipolar transistor has an emitter, base and collector. A FET has a gate, source and drain. A triode tube has a cathode, grid and plate.
• Resistor colour code: black 0, brown 1, red 2, orange 3, yellow 4, green 5, blue 6, violet 7, grey 8, white 9. Brown, black, red is 1000 ohms.

Feed lines and antennas

• Most amateur coaxial cable is about 50 ohms, matching most radios.
• SWR of 1:1 is a perfect match. Higher SWR means power is reflected back.
• A balun joins a balanced antenna, such as a dipole, to unbalanced coax.
• Feed line loss grows with length and with frequency.
• Wavelength in metres is about 300 divided by the frequency in MHz. At 146 MHz that is about 2 metres.
• A half-wave dipole is about half a wavelength long, a little shorter in practice. For 14.2 MHz it is about 10 metres.
• A Yagi has a reflector (longest), a driven element and a director (shortest). It sends most of its signal one way.
• A vertical antenna gives vertical polarization. VHF FM stations usually use vertical antennas.
• An isotropic radiator is an imaginary antenna that radiates equally in all directions. It is used as a reference for gain.

Propagation and interference

How signals travel

• Ground wave follows the earth. Sky wave is bent back by the ionosphere.
• VHF and UHF signals usually go through the ionosphere, so their normal range is about line of sight.
• The skip zone is where no signal is heard, between the end of the ground wave and where the sky wave returns.
• The D region absorbs lower HF signals by day and disappears at night.
• The F region gives the longest HF contacts.
• The sunspot cycle lasts about 11 years. More sunspots usually help the higher HF bands.
• Sporadic-E, aurora and tropospheric ducting can carry VHF signals much farther than normal.
• The maximum usable frequency is the highest frequency the ionosphere will return over a path.

Interference

• Front-end overload: a strong nearby signal overwhelms a receiver.
• Harmonics are whole-number multiples of your frequency. The second harmonic of 7.1 MHz is 14.2 MHz.
• A low-pass filter at an HF transmitter output blocks harmonics that could reach TV and FM receivers. A high-pass filter at a TV input blocks HF signals.
• Audio rectification makes your voice appear in stereos or phones. Ferrite chokes and bypass capacitors on the affected device fix it.