March 2026 Open Testing

Thank you for your interest in our licensing class and exam event. This event, offered by the Amateur Radio Association at the University of Maryland (W3EAX), will be broken into two components: a Technician exam class followed by the exam itself. We are offering exams under the ARRL VEC. Please see the following for more information.

Who: University of Maryland community and members of the general public interested in obtaining an FCC amateur radio license

When: Saturday, March 28. We will send a firm schedule closer to the event date but tentatively, the license class will take place from 9:30 to 12:30 and the exam will occur at 1:00 after a lunch break

Where: Jimenez Hall at the University of Maryland, College Park, Room 0220 (Location will be confirmed closer to the event)

Fees: The class portion of the event is free. The exam portion will follow the fees as required by the ARRL VEC (see https://www.arrl.org/arrl-vec-exam-fees). Fees will be due on the day of the exam. Please note that separate from the VEC fee, the FCC has its own $35 fee due directly to the FCC only if you pass the exam.

Note: Per ARRL policy, one fee covers one attempt at each of the three license levels. Therefore, we encourage you to study and try for the highest license level you can to make the most of your exam fee. Relatedly, we will allow for retakes time-permitting but this incurs another fee per our VEC's policy.

Resources: We recommend the following resources for studying for the exam and understanding its content. All test questions are publicly available and you can easily run through the questions and practice tests online.

While we will be teaching a lot of material in the class, we will not cover everything you may need to know for the exam. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the test questions before you come. HamStudy.org is a great resource for learning the questions:

• Technician question pool
• General question pool
• Extra question pool

Please contact Steven Su (email: stevensu@terpmail.umd.edu) with any questions.