so ive been a tech for about 2 years now mostly doing 2m/70cm stuff and some APRS and i finally decided i want to get on HF. everyone keeps telling me to just go get my general already so i started looking at the question pool and honestly its a lot more than i expected.

my main confusion is i dont really know which parts of the exam are going to be the hardest or where to focus. like i get that theres electrical theory stuff and i was never great at math in school so that part worries me a bit. also im not totally sure what bands i actually get with general vs what i have now as a tech. do i get all the HF bands or just some of them? i know extra class gets more but i wasnt sure how much more general opens up vs tech.

been using ham study dot org to practice and i feel like im getting maybe 75-80% on the practice tests which probably isnt good enough yet. any tips from people who went through this recently? what should i actually study harder vs just memorize

75-80% on practice tests is actually not bad at a starting point, the passing score is 74% so youre already close but yeah you want some buffer. the math stuff on general honestly isnt that bad, most of it is just ohms law variations and a little bit of resonance formula stuff. if you can just memorize the formulas and plug in numbers you'll be fine, they arent trying to make you derive anything from scratch.

as for bands, general opens up a big chunk of HF. you get access to 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10 meters with some segment restrictions, plus 17 and 12 meters i think. tech already gives you the top part of 10m for HF but honestly nobody really works that. 40 and 20 meters are where most of the action is and general gets you in there. extra class opens up the lower portions of some bands where the DX tends to pile up but general is totally usable, i worked over 60 countries before i upgraded to extra.

just keep hammering the practice tests and read the explanations for the ones you get wrong. the ARRL general class book is decent if you want actual context for why the answers are what they are rather than just memorizing.

i did this exact same thing like 8 months ago, went from tech to general. the propagation questions tripped me up more than the math honestly, like understanding why certain bands work better at different times of day and the whole ionosphere stuff. once i watched a couple youtube videos about how skywave propagation works it clicked and those questions got a lot easier.

also the license privileges section is worth knowing cold because some of those questions are weirdly specific about which part of which band you can use which mode on. just spend an hour with the band plan and it starts to make more sense.