About
This is self-study courseware for the FCC and FAA radio credentials, built as a knowledge graph rather than a book. Lessons, flashcards, figures, and the practice engine all derive from one set of authored files plus primary sources fetched by hash — so a claim can be traced to the document it came from, and a stale one shows up as a build failure rather than as a wrong answer on exam day.
It is free, it stores nothing about you anywhere but your own browser, and it is nobody's product. The formal terms are on the licences page; the provenance of every source document is on the sources page.
What made it possible
Three bodies of work this is built on top of, and could not substitute for.
NCVEC Question Pool Committeevolunteer examiners
Writes and maintains every amateur examination question, then releases each pool into the public domain. Not merely published because the rules require it — given away. This project would not exist otherwise.
Office of the Federal RegistereCFR
Serves the entire Code of Federal Regulations as structured XML, free and versioned by date. Every regulatory claim here is pinned to a dated fetch because of it.
FCC, FAA, and NISTUS Government
Public notices, Part 107 and Part 89, and the WWV time-service standard — all published openly and, as works of the US Government, free of copyright.
Typefaces
Both self-hosted, both under the SIL Open Font License, so the site works offline and sends no request anywhere to render a page.
InterRasmus Andersson and the Inter Project Authors
Every piece of interface text, and the reason small labels stay legible.
Source Serif 4Frank Grießhaber, for Adobe
The lessons themselves. It is what makes this read like writing rather than a dashboard.
Open source
Given away by the people below, and used here without asking anything of them. Named rather than listed, because "dependencies" is a poor word for other people's work.
Astrowithastro
The site framework.
Tailwind CSSTailwind Labs
Styling.
KaTeXKhan Academy and contributors
Every formula on the site, typeset at build time.
D3Mike Bostock
Force layout, drag, and zoom in the graph explorer.
remark-math and rehype-katexJunyoung Choi
Maths in markdown.
SymPythe SymPy development team
Proves every derivation on each build, so the algebra shown is checked, not asserted.
matplotlibJohn D. Hunter, Michael Droettboom, and contributors
Every figure. Hunter started it in 2003 and died in 2012; it long outlived him.
scikit-rfAlex Arsenovic and contributors
The independent second opinion on the RF numbers — a separate implementation is the only kind of check worth having.
schemdrawCollin J. Delker
Circuit schematics as code.
NumPy and NetworkXTravis Oliphant, Aric Hagberg, and contributors
Arithmetic and the knowledge graph itself.
PintHernán Grecco
Dimensional analysis, which catches unit slips arithmetic cannot see.
genankiKerrick Staley
Builds the Anki deck, with stable GUIDs so re-importing keeps your scheduling.
Typer, Rich, httpx, PyYAML, jsonschema, python-docxSebastián Ramírez, Will McGugan, Tom Christie, Kirill Simonov, Julian Berman, Steve Canny
The CLI, its output, and every fetch and parse behind it.
TailscaleTailscale Inc.
Serves this privately, with TLS, without any of it touching the public internet.
A note on the pools
The Question Pool Committee deserves the top of this page rather than a footnote. Writing and maintaining roughly fourteen hundred examination questions across three licence classes, revising them on a four-year cycle, and issuing errata when the rules change is substantial, unglamorous, volunteer work. Releasing the result into the public domain — not merely publishing it because 47 CFR 97.523 says they must — is what lets anyone build something like this without asking permission.
NCVEC is not affiliated with this project and does not endorse it. Nothing here is an official publication of the FCC, the FAA, the NCVEC, or the ARRL, and where this material and the regulation disagree, the regulation governs.