ISED Basic Qualification Anki Deck🔗

Study tool

All 984 questions from ISED's Basic Qualification question bank (15 July 2025 edition), as a free Anki deck. Covers all eight Basic exam sections, B-001 to B-008.

Every question on the Canadian Basic Qualification exam comes from one public question bank, published by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). The bank holds 984 questions, and each exam draws 100 of them. That makes the bank a natural fit for spaced repetition: a review method that shows each card again just before you would forget it, so study time goes to the questions that are still shaky.

This deck puts the whole bank into Anki, the free, open-source spaced-repetition app. It's a drill for recall, and it works best alongside real understanding (see How to Use It Well below).

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ised_basic_qualification_2025-07-15.apkg · 984 cards · 631 KB

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What the Exam Draws From the Bank🔗

The bank's size is misleading until you see how the exam is assembled. ISED's RIC-3 divides the syllabus into 100 numbered topic areas, and every exam takes exactly one question from each. A section's weight on the exam is its number of topic areas, not its number of bank questions:

3D column chart of how many exam questions come from each section: B-001 Regulations 25, B-003 Station and Safety 21, B-005 Electronics 13, B-006 Antennas and Feedlines 13, B-002 Operating 9, B-007 Propagation 8, B-004 Components 6, B-008 Interference 5. Beneath each column, the number of questions that section has in the bank. — Each column is one section's share of a 100-question exam. The bank counts underneath are how many questions each share is drawn from.

Section	Bank questions	Topic areas = exam questions	Bank questions per exam slot
B-001 Regulations and Policies	199	25	8.0
B-002 Operating and Procedures	99	9	11.0
B-003 Station Assembly, Practice and Safety	199	21	9.5
B-004 Circuit Components	63	6	10.5
B-005 Basic Electronics and Theory	142	13	10.9
B-006 Feedlines and Antenna Systems	140	13	10.8
B-007 Radio Wave Propagation	87	8	10.9
B-008 Interference and Suppression	55	5	11.0
Total	984	100

Regulations and station practice together make up 46 of the 100 exam questions, almost half. A pass is 70%, and 80% earns Basic with Honours, which adds the bands below 30 MHz.

How the Deck Is Organized🔗

The deck mirrors the exam's own structure, so you can study one section at a time or the whole bank at once:

A stack of 984 cards branching into eight smaller stacks, one per exam section: B-001 199, B-002 99, B-003 199, B-004 63, B-005 142, B-006 140, B-007 87, B-008 55. — One parent deck, eight section subdecks.

Each card looks the way the exam does:

Front: the section, the question ID (like B-005-002-004), the question, and options A to D.
Back: the correct letter and the full text of the correct answer.

Every card is also tagged by section and by topic area (for example ISED_Basic::B-005 and ISED_Basic::B-005-002). In Anki's browser, a tag search pulls up every question in one topic area, which is the quickest way to see the full range of ways the exam can ask about one idea.

Importing It🔗

Anki runs on every major platform, and the deck imports the same way on each:

Desktop (Linux, macOS, Windows)Android (AnkiDroid)iPhone and iPad (AnkiMobile)

Install Anki from apps.ankiweb.net, then open the downloaded file, or use File → Import and choose it.

Install AnkiDroid (free), then open the downloaded .apkg file and choose AnkiDroid to import it.

Install AnkiMobile (a paid app that funds Anki's development), then open the downloaded file and share it to AnkiMobile.

To study on several devices, import on one and sync through a free AnkiWeb account.

Updating: each card's identity comes from its question ID. When ISED publishes a new bank and this deck is rebuilt, importing the new file updates the existing cards in place and keeps your review history.

How to Use It Well🔗

A deck like this can carry someone to a pass by pattern-matching: recognizing the shape of the right answer without knowing why it's right. That works for the exam and fails the first time something goes wrong on the air. The deck works best as one part of a loop:

A study loop drawn as a ring. Learn the idea first, then drill the section's cards. At the check 'right, and know why?', yes leads to Anki spacing the card out until its review comes due and it returns to the drill. Guessed or wrong leads to a red box: mark it wrong and re-read the idea, then back to the drill. — Honest grading is what makes the loop work: a guess marked as known never comes back in time.

A few habits make the difference:

Grade honestly. A lucky guess marked "Good" teaches Anki that you know something you don't. Mark it wrong and it comes back sooner.
Explain the answer to yourself before flipping. If you can't say why the right option is right and the others are wrong, treat the card as missed.
Study a section after learning it, not before. Cards drilled cold become a memorized list. Cards drilled after the idea makes sense become reminders.
Don't memorize letters. The real exam may present options in a different order, so learn the answer, not its position.

Source and Accuracy🔗

The deck is built from ISED's official files by a script, with nothing typed by hand:

Source: the delimited question file from ISED's downloads page (amat_basic_quest.zip, modified 15 July 2025), which lists each question's correct answer separately from the three wrong ones.
Cross-check: every question was also parsed from ISED's printed PDF bank of the same date and compared against the delimited file. All 984 IDs match, the answer letter on every card agrees with its answer text, and each section's topic-area count matches RIC-3.

The cross-check found 11 questions where ISED's two official files disagree. Most are wording ("deviation" vs. "excursion", "SWR at the antenna" vs. "SWR at the transmitter"). Two are more than wording: the PDF files the off-centre-fed antenna question under B-003-019-008 instead of B-008-002-011, prints a "stereo amplifiers" question that isn't in the delimited file, and leaves out the "chassis ground" question that is. The deck follows the delimited file, which is internally consistent (each question sits in the topic area that matches its subject):

B-001-003-004, B-002-003-011, B-003-013-007, B-003-019-008, B-005-004-010, B-005-005-010, B-005-008-011, B-006-004-006, B-007-004-011, B-008-002-011, B-008-004-004

If a study guide or practice test words one of these differently, this is why.

Reproduction notice

Questions reproduced from Basic Qualification Question Bank for Amateur Radio Operator Certificate Examinations (15 July 2025), Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. This is a copy of the version available at ised-isde.canada.ca, reproduced for non-commercial use under ISED's terms, and is not an official version. The deck is free.