Applying, Sitting and Passing

Everything in this course has been aimed at one hour in a room at a wireless monitoring station. This lesson is about that hour and about the paperwork on either side of it — who runs the examination, how you apply, what the paper looks like, how the marking works, and what happens between passing and the day your call sign arrives. None of it is technical, and all of it is the sort of thing that quietly costs people a sitting: an application submitted a fortnight too late, a photograph three kilobytes too large, an hour spent on Section A while Section B goes unfinished.

Who examines you

The examination is set and conducted by the Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) Wing of the Department of Telecommunications. WPC also issues the certificate and allots your call sign.

Clubs matter enormously to Indian amateur radio, and you will probably learn more from one than from any book — the Amateur Radio Society of India, the National Institute of Amateur Radio, a number of other national and regional bodies and your local club all teach, coach and run field days. But none of them examines you, and none of them issues a licence. WPC does not itself provide training. That division is a standard exam question.

Applying

Applications are made online through the Saral Sanchar portal — saralsanchar.gov.in — which is DoT's unified licensing portal. You register once as an Individual (WPC Exams/Certificates), verifying both an email address and a mobile number by OTP, and the account then carries you through the examination, the station authorisation and every renewal afterwards.

The documents, and their size limits

The upload limits are strict and the portal simply refuses anything over them. Prepare these before you begin, not while a session is timing out.

The fee

The examination fee is Rs 100 per grade. Entering for both Restricted and General at one sitting therefore costs Rs 200, and if you do that and pass only Part I you are issued the Restricted certificate. Foreign applicants pay Rs 1 000.

Payment is not made on the licensing portal itself. It goes through Bharatkosh, the government's Non-Tax Receipt Portal, at bharatkosh.gov.in, under the purpose head for amateur examinations conducted by wireless monitoring stations, and against the Pay and Accounts Office of the regional headquarters covering your chosen centre. You then enter the amount, the transaction reference number and the date back into the application and attach the receipt. Keep it: it is the only proof that the payment and the application belong together.

The licence fee is separate and falls due only after you pass — Rs 1 000 for twenty years or Rs 2 000 for a lifetime authorisation.

Centres, and when the examination is actually held

The paper is held at WPC's wireless monitoring stations and international monitoring stations — around twenty-seven of them, from Ahmedabad and Ajmer through Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai to Shillong, Siliguri and Visakhapatnam. You choose your centre in the application, and you cannot change it afterwards; nor can you change the grade you have entered for.

The honest position on scheduling is the one the official material states plainly: there is no published calendar. A monitoring station holds the examination as and when it has enough candidates — roughly monthly in the metros, considerably less often at a quieter station. The date, time and venue are intimated to you by that station, by SMS, once your hall ticket is issued. If you live in a city with no monitoring station, a sitting can be arranged at a school, university, education centre or amateur radio club provided at least twenty candidates come forward, with the application going to the nearest monitoring station — exactly the kind of thing a local club exists to organise.

Because of all that, apply at least one month before the date you hope to sit, and preferably more. Scrutiny takes time, a rejected document costs you a cycle, and you cannot be scheduled for a sitting you have not yet been cleared for.

The paper

The question counts are the long-standing convention rather than something the rules prescribe, so do not be thrown if a paper has a different number of items; the marks and the duration are what is fixed. Everything is multiple choice with four options.

The pass rule, and the arithmetic of it

Both limbs must be satisfied. A strong section cannot rescue a weak one, and this is where candidates who study only the theory come unstuck.

Worked example. Take a paper of 50 marks in Section A and 50 in Section B.

• A candidate scores 38 in A and 18 in B. The aggregate is 56 out of 100, comfortably over 50%. But Section B is 18 ÷ 50 = 36%, below the 40% floor. Fail.
• Another scores 21 in A and 24 in B. Both sections clear 40% (21 ÷ 50 = 42%, 24 ÷ 50 = 48%). But the aggregate is 45 out of 100, which is 45%. Fail.
• A third scores 24 in A and 28 in B — 48% and 56%, aggregate 52%. Pass, on both limbs, with nothing to spare.

The number to carry into the hall is therefore not “fifty”. It is 20 out of 50 in each section as an absolute floor, and 50 out of 100 together. Aim well above both.

Morse

There is no Morse test for the Restricted grade. That is stated in the syllabus in as many words, and it is asked in the paper. The international rules leave the question to each administration, and India has removed it for this grade.

For the General grade, Part II is a Morse test at 8 words per minute, in both sending and receiving, and you must pass both together. Receiving is a plain language passage of 200 characters, which may include letters, figures and the punctuation marks full stop, comma, semicolon, break sign, hyphen and question mark. A word counts as five characters and each figure or punctuation mark counts as two. The test runs for five consecutive minutes, preceded by a one-minute practice piece at the same speed. You get one attempt. More than five errors disqualifies — but receiving any one continuous minute of the passage without a single error is itself a pass. Over-writing counts as an error, so if you need to correct a character, strike it through and write the correction above it. Sending is the same material under the same conditions.

The Section A exemption

The syllabus carries a note exempting from Section A a candidate holding a degree in Engineering or Science, or a Diploma in Engineering, having studied electronics or telecommunications — in practice BE or BTech, BSc or MSc, or a diploma in engineering, in each case with those subjects, with the certificate and semester mark sheets uploaded as proof.

Two cautions. The exemption covers only the radio theory — everybody sits Section B, whatever their qualification. And while this provision is long-standing and still printed in the syllabus, it is not restated in the 2024 Rules, so confirm it on the portal before you rely on it. If in any doubt, prepare Section A anyway; it is half the course you have just finished.

After you pass

Passing the examination does not entitle you to transmit. It entitles you to apply for the station authorisation, and that application is a separate step on the same portal, to be made within two years of passing. You will be asked for:

• the location of the station — the address where the equipment will be installed;
• details of the equipment you intend to use, which feeds the equipment register you must maintain thereafter;
• three call-sign preferences, in order. The grant is subject to availability, so choose three you would actually be happy with rather than one you want and two you do not.

How long does it take? There is no published service standard, and it would be dishonest to give you a number. What can be said is that the security clearance step which used to add many months was removed for amateur licensing in March 2016 — so the old forum accounts of year-long waits for police and Ministry of Home Affairs verification describe a process that no longer applies. Waits vary by regional headquarters. Plan for weeks to a few months, chase politely through the portal's status page, and keep your payment references.

Managing the hour

Sixty minutes, a hundred marks. If the paper is the usual fifty questions, that is seventy-two seconds each — enough for every question in this course, and not enough for any question you decide to argue with.

1. Do Section B first. It is the cheaper half. Regulations, Q-codes, phonetics, band limits, emission designators and the distress procedure are all recall: you either know them in five seconds or you do not know them, and no amount of sitting there will change that. Section A questions can be worked out, and working out takes time. Bank the certain marks first, then spend what is left on the ones that reward thought.
2. Make one pass, fast. Answer everything you are sure of, and mark the rest with a dot in the margin. Do not stall. A question you cannot start in twenty seconds is a question for the second pass.
3. On the second pass, eliminate. Four options, and usually two are obviously wrong — a wrong unit, an impossible magnitude, a value outside an Indian band. Knocking out two turns a guess worth 25% into one worth 50%. Look for the answers this course has warned you about: alpha greater than 1, a power figure quoted as output rather than DC input, 1820–1860 kHz for 160 m, Juliet with one t.
4. Leave nothing blank. Read the instructions printed on your paper first — they are the authority on whether a wrong answer is penalised. Nothing in the published pattern describes negative marking, so unless your paper says otherwise, an eliminated guess is strictly better than an empty box.
5. Watch the sectional floor, not the total. With ten minutes left, count how many you have left blank in each section separately. If one section is thin, spend the remaining time there even if the other looks more answerable — the aggregate will not save you.

A revision plan for the last fortnight