Welcome to the Technician Class Study Guide!

This program is designed to help you study and review the question pool for the Technician Class exam. The main screen of the program is displayed below:

You can see the following elements and buttons across the top of the screen:

First is the current question number, and the total number of questions. (Note: the total number of questions can change, depending on whether you are viewing the full question set, the list of missed questions, or a sample test.)

The next item shows the number of correctly answered questions, the total number of questions answered (so far), and the actual (correct/total) percentage.

This button allows you to take a sample test (35 questions, one question randomly selected from each group).

This button resets the program; questions are restored to the full set of questions, and to their normal order. Also, the missed-questions list is cleared.

This button takes you back to the beginning of the current list of questions.

These two buttons allow you to navigate to the previous or next question, respectively.

This is the main question window:



Basically, this frame displays the current question, and the possible answers.
Answer a question by clicking the appropriate button, or by pressing the appropriate letter from the keyboard.
(Hint: you can also press the numeric keys 1-4 instead of the letters A-D)

The program will make a tone depending on whether the question is answered correctly or not.
(You can change the sounds by replacing "correct.wav" and "incorrect.wav" in the program folder.)

If you do not answer the question correctly, the answer that you selected will be highlighted with a dark red background, and you will be able to try again. If you answer the question correctly, you will advance automatically to the next question.

The question id number (sub-element, group, and sequence) is displayed at the bottom for reference.

The next window shows you which sub-element and group the current question is drawn from.



These buttons (to the right of the sub-element/group descriptions) allow you to navigate to the next sub-element or group; this is helpful when you want to study or review a specific section of the question pool.

The next frame shows the options for answers:

The first option ( ) will display the correct answer in bold text. This is useful when you first start studying the material, and you are basically just reading the questions to see what the right answers are.

Here is an example of what this looks like:

The next option ( ), if checked, will shuffle the answers, to make your reviews more challenging. This will give you some confidence that you actually know the answers, and not just the position of the correct answer. (I don't think that they rearrange the answers on the test, but you never know...)

This button will display your correct-incorrect answer statistics, first summarized by sub-element, and then in more detail by sub-group. The numbers on the statistics page are actually [number of correct answers, hyphen, number of incorrect answers]; sort of like "won-loss" statistics in sports. They are NOT "n out of x"! I did it this way to make it easier to spot which groups have wrong answers in them (look for any non-zero value in the "incorrect" column).

The next frame shows the options for questions:

The "Review Missed Questions" button ( ) allows you to review questions that you've missed. Every question that is not answered correctly on the first try is added to the "missed questions list"; when you check this option, that list becomes the active list of questions.

The button will remain depressed while you are reviewing the "missed questions list" (as shown here) and indicates that this mode is [still] active.

If you click this button again, you will be prompted to clear the "missed questions list", and then you will go back to reviewing the full list of questions. (You can also clear this list at any time by pressing the "reset" button.)

This button will shuffle the entire list of questions that you are currently reviewing. This is another option to make your review more challenging (and keep you from remembering answers just by which order the questions appear in).
NOTE: if you use this option, you will not be able to navigate from sub-element to sub-element or from group to group!

This button also shuffles the questions, but only within each group. In other words, you'll get all of group T1A (in random order), followed by T1B, etc. Since this option keeps the groups together, you can still use the sub-element and group navigation buttons.

This button of course brings up the on-line help! (Ok, I'm sure you knew that already, but I had to include it anyway just to be complete!) :-) You can also access the on-line help (or the "About" page) by right-clicking just about anywhere on the screen.

I hope that you'll find this program helpful - feel free to e-mail me at ralph@sickinger.net if you have any comments or questions.

And, if this program does help you, I'd love to hear from you just to know that you passed!
Good luck on your Technician Class exam - I hope to hear you on the air soon!

Ralph Sickinger (K3RPS)