Get your own Callsign!

I've put this information together to hopefully help out in basic understanding of ham radios and how I went about learning about the test, taking the test and purchasing my first radio.

The Technician test is the first test and only test you would need unless you decided to move onto the others. It is 35 questions and you can miss 9 and still pass, miss 10 and you do not pass. Attached is an excellent Study guide for the Technician test. It was downloaded from this site. http://kb6nu.com/tech-manual/ 

The test questions are taken from a pool of approx 400 questions and they are reviewed, updated and some removed every 5 years or so. Because of this, the study guide above is based on the current set of questions and you can study with a phone app or using web sites (there are many).

For the Android phones there is an app called "Amateur Radio Exams Pro 1.0", it was $2.99 and well worth it. 

For Online Tests my favorite was http://hamexam.org/

When it comes time to take the test there are a few places to do it. I took it at the EOC (Salt Lake City Emergency Operations Center) near the Salt Lake City Jail. Here is a listing of scheduled exams. http://www.xmission.com/~uarc/testinfo.html The test was $14 and if you pass the first you get a free chance to take the second test and third if you pass the second one. 

There are many radios out there. There are handhelds, mobile units for your car or house and then large base stations. Please keep in mind, I have no indepth information on these. What I know is from the vendor websites, eham reviews (http://www.eham.net/reviews/), hamradio.com (http://hamradio.com/) and talking with people. Brands that I found as the 3 main players were Icom, Kenwood and Yaesu. I saw radios from $100 - $550. Some entry level ones that I liked in the Yaesu brand was the FT-60R. In the midrange I liked the Kenwood TH-F6A and the Yaesu VX-6R and then in the high end models I liked the Kenwood TH-D72A and the Icom IC-92AD. In the end I decided on the Kenwood TH-D72A because I wanted APRS which is something the radio will do sending out a beacon using the GPS. See http://aprs.fi/

You will see radios that are single band, dual band, tri band and even some quad bands. That that means is you are able to talk on that many bands. Bands are the different wave lengths. Shorter wave lengths (high frequency) do not go as far and longer wave lengths (low frequency) go further and can be sent all the way to Africa and places on the other side of the globe. The most common handheld bands that I found were 2m and 70cm, with 2m being the important band for emergency communications. 

Handhelds are going to have less power seems most was a 5W max. Mobile units were 50-75W and the base stations were 100W+ in general.