Practice using the real Full Exam question bank
I read this news snippet in the July 2026 issue of Practical Wireless
At its 2024 meeting, the RSGB Examination Standards Committee agreed, with Ofcom approval, to publish the Full level examination question bank after a thorough vetting of the questions by the Examinations and Syllabus Review Group had taken place. ESC Chair Tony Kent G8PBH is pleased to announce that the question bank is now available via: https://rsgb.org/exam-questions
I took the opportunity to check this out by doing a mock Full exam. In 1978 I travelled up on the train from south London to take the City and Guilds RAE somewhere near the University of London Senate building. I crammed the licence conditions on the train, I relied on a general interest in electronics from several years to wing it through the technical content. I was far too poor to actually do anything with the ticket, in the 1970s amateur radio kit was dear relative to now. VHF gear was even more expensive than HF, and beyond my teenage self’s ability to construct/debug.
In those days amateurs without Morse were limited to 2m and up with the Class B licence, no HF for them, because they might cause interference to commercial traffic that still used Morse at the time so the offending amateur needed to be able to understand the curt instruction to gerroff this frequency, lid
The teaching for Morse was tapes, unsophisticated compared to teaching now. I have repeatedly demonstrated over the intervening 40+ years that I have no natural aptitude to learn Morse at any useful speed. It really is time to pack it in, I ain’t gonna learn Morse now. Some people have got it, and I’m not one of them1.
My younger self passed both RAE papers with distinction. I only applied for the licence based on that RAE pass in 1992 when I was earning enough to buy a secondhand Yaesu FT290 for £250, that’s £567 in today’s money! There’s talk these days of how the full exam is harder than the RAE was, so I decided to try this, from a standing start and no licence conditions paper showing frequency bands and limitations which I think you get in the real exam.
I dialled up a Full Mock exam on the website and hit it, finishing in half an hour. It was a hot day when there was a red alert for extreme heat so I didn’t apply myself that much like first time, the stakes were lower, too.
I am unable to determine if this is a pass, because the Direct to Full exam is marked in two sections, but Full is one exam. I think this is the Full exam, not Direct to Full so it is marked as one and the passmark is 60%. That is predicated on having passed Foundation and Intermediate, these were not available at the time of writing.
It is possible these are heavy on material where I have gaps. Full is much heavier on technical content than the other two exams from what I recall from seeing the papers as an invigilator. In fairness the news snippet said
the RSGB Examination Standards Committee agreed, with Ofcom approval, to publish the Full level examination question bank
so maybe Foundation and Intermediate (and Direct To full) won’t be published, at least not for a while. There’s much more club and online support for Foundation and Intermediate whereas Full seems to be considered more a self-study sort of thing.
The upshot is that I am probably still fit to be on the air as a full Licensee in the modern amateur radio environment, 48 years after taking the RAE ;)
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I know the code acceptably. At ridiculously slow speeds I could decipher it, just not at any useful speed. ↩