Foundation Training

A summary of the resources I found useful in my Foundation Training. Courses, books, and online assets.

Foundation Training for Amateur Radio

I'm lucky enough to have come to amateur radio at a very interesting time for those wanting to enter the hobby. The traditional route of joining a club and training with them is not open to us as we are in the midst of another COVID lockdown.

However, many clubs are offering online training and RSGB are offering online invigilated examinations. So I'm able to obtain (fingers crossed, my exam is at the end of the month) my foundation licence all through the internet. What a time we live in. [Reader - I passed with 100% so it worked...]

Resources for Training

There are a wide range of training resources, which I will link to here, along with my view of their usefulness to a novice radio amateur. I hope that people coming into the hobby might find some of this useful, but another great place to look is the RSGB website which has links to a wide range of training resources.

Online Courses

Online courses vary from a virtual classroom approach through to online documentation and a number of stops in-between. Each fulfils a slightly different need and I've used a few that I will talk about here.

• "Getting Tae Grips" with the UK Foundation Licence - this is an online course made up of PDFs, quizzes, videos and other resources that take you through the whole syllabus and give you a series of mock exams. I can't recommend this highly enough. I used the mock exam to check my weaknesses and revised the areas in question.
• Essex Ham training - I didn't do this course with Essex Ham but the course I did do used this material.
• Chippenham & District Amateur Radio Club - they offer an online Foundation training course consisting of online sessions using Microsoft Teams, lead by an excellent tutor (Paul Lewis - 2E0IZB, massive thanks to Paul for all of his help), and done as a cohort so there are others to talk with as you progress. They also offered a number of knowledge checks and mock exams which were really useful. Again, I'd highly recommend this, even though I know a lot of the material, the motivation of the sessions and the presentation of the material really helped me.

Books

• Foundation Licence Manual - The Foundation Licence Manual for Radio Amateurs is the RSGB course-book for those who wish to become radio amateurs in the UK.

YouTube

I watched a lot of YouTube videos on amateur radio in general but also on specific topic to help my learning. Too many to list here, but if you type 'Amateur Radio << topic >>' then I'll almost guarantee there is a video on it, if not a few.