so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. like i mostly operate on 40 and 20 meters doing casual SSB and the occasional psk31 when im bored. from what i understand the extra opens up some more HF spectrum but honestly i dont feel like im running out of room on what i have now. the question pool looks brutal too, all that stuff about filter theory and reactance and whatever else. my buddy at the club keeps saying the theory is actually useful and not just test trivia but i dunno. is the extra exam mostly just memorizing a bigger question pool or does it actually teach you things you end up using? also is there a good way to study for it thats not just hammering hamstudy.org for weeks

honestly the theory stuff is more useful than you'd think, at least it was for me. i went in expecting to just memorize my way through it like i did the technician and general but some of the filter and impedance matching stuff actually clicked in a way that made me understand why certain things in my shack were behaving weird. that said there's definitely still a chunk of it that's just... memorize the answer and move on, especially the regs portions. for studying i used the ARRL extra class manual alongside hamstudy and the combination worked pretty well. the manual actually explains the why behind things which made the memorization stick better. as for the spectrum thing, the extra subbands on 75, 40 and 15 meters are genuinely less crowded in my experience, especially on 75 phone. whether thats worth the effort depends on how much you operate i guess

i just passed mine like three weeks ago so this is fresh. the exam wasnt as bad as i thought it would be but i spent probably six weeks studying on and off. the math questions look scary but half of them you can just learn the pattern for and a lot of the answers are the same formula rearranged. what actually surprised me was how much of the extra question pool is about stuff i already vaguely knew from just operating and tinkering, like it wasnt all totally foreign. the privledges are nice but tbh i upgraded mostly because i wanted to say i did it lol. if you already know your way around HF and have some electronics background you could probably knock it out faster than you think