so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just use my HT for the local repeaters but ive been listening to HF a lot lately and really want to get on 40m and maybe try some SSB stuff. my buddy keeps telling me to just go take the General exam already but im not sure how hard the jump is from Tech material.

i remember the Tech exam being pretty rough in some spots, mostly the math questions on antennas and stuff. is the General similar difficulty or worse? im using the HamStudy app right now and some of the questions about things like operating procedures and propagation i kind of get but then there's the electrical stuff and i start zoning out. anyone gone through this recently and have tips? also does it matter which band i should focus on learning first once i pass or is that a separate thing to figure out later

the General pool isnt really harder than Tech honestly, its just a lot more of the same kind of stuff plus some HF-specific things you probably havent thought about yet like band plans and emission types. the math questions people stress about are honestly not that bad if you just memorize the formulas, most of them are the same ohms law and power stuff recycled with different numbers.

i upgraded last spring after about 3 weeks of just running through HamStudy every night before bed, maybe 20 minutes a day and i passed with room to spare. the section on electrical principles tripped me up at first too but once you realize theyre basically asking the same 4 or 5 concepts over and over it clicks. for HF once you pass, 40m is a great starting point like you said, pretty forgiving during the day and you can actually hear a lot even with a mediocre antenna setup. dont overthink it just go schedule the exam, worst case you retake it

yeah i just did this like two months ago, was a Tech for almost two years before i finally got around to it. honestly the hardest part for me was the stuff about operating privileges and which frequencies you can use where because theres a lot of it and it all kind of blurs together. the electrical theory wasnt too scary if youre already comfortable with the Tech level stuff.

one thing though, once you actually get on HF its a totally different world than repeaters. i wasnt ready for how much just listening matters before you start transmitting, spent a good week just tuning around on 20m trying to figure out how people were finding each other and what the conventions were. nobody really explains that part in the study guides