Ham Amateur Radio Technician Practice Exam 2026 - Free Technician Practice Questions and Study Guide

PSK31 is a digital mode used in amateur radio that transmits data efficiently over radio frequencies. The correct answer, Varicode, is a variable-length encoding scheme designed specifically for PSK31. This code optimizes the representation of characters based on their frequency in the English language, allowing more commonly used letters to be represented with shorter bit sequences. As a result, Varicode enhances the efficiency of the PSK31 transmission by minimizing the overall bandwidth used during data transmission.

ASCII, while widely used for character encoding, is not the code employed specifically for PSK31 signals. It has fixed-length representations and does not offer the same optimization for radio transmission as Varicode does. Hexadecimal is a base-16 numbering system used for various applications but is not used for encoding characters in PSK31. Morse Code, although a historical method for communication in amateur radio, does not apply to digital modes like PSK31 that utilize modern encoding techniques.