Chapter 2: Electrical Components #

Chapter 1 was about the principles. This chapter is about the things those principles apply to.

Open up any radio, or look at a schematic diagram, and you’ll see dozens of small parts — resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, transistors, and so on — each doing a specific job. We’re not going to teach you how to design circuits with them; that’s a full electronics course, and it’s not what you need for a Technician license. What we are going to do is give you a field guide: what these parts are, what they do at a high level, and how to recognize them when they show up in a schematic or a conversation.

That’s enough to take some of the mystery out of the stuff inside your equipment, and enough to handle the component questions on the exam. If you want to go deeper after that, there’s a whole world of hobbyist electronics waiting — but this chapter isn’t trying to be the entire trip.