I currently hold a US Amateur Extra license (my callsign is KK6DCT) which in the UK would be equivalent to the Full license. I’m curious what the similarities and difference are between US licenses and UK licenses so decided to take a look. This is just a casual observation so please do not refer to anything here as fact, I may and probably do have some things wrong.
In the US the 3 license classes are Technician, General and Extra, where Extra has full privileges. In the UK the equivalents are Foundation, Intermediate and Full. In the US each license level gives you access to additional bands and ranges within each band. Technician in summary gives you VHF and above plus part of 10m, General adds parts of the HF bands and Extra gives you full access to everything. With the UK licenses, privileges are by allowed TX power, with Foundation restricting you to 10w access to parts of most bands HF and VHF, Intermediate raises the allowed power to 50w, and Full to 400w.
For US licenses you are required to identify your station at least once every 10 minutes. For the UK license you’re required to identify ‘as frequently as is practicable during transmissions‘ but there’s no time requirement specified.
I’m curious what other differences there are – I may come back and add to this post later. If you’re aware of more differences leave a comment below.