so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been messing around on 2m and some 70cm repeaters, did a little satellite stuff which was cool but honestly i want to get on HF and actually talk to people further away. my buddy who got his General last year keeps telling me its not that bad but i dunno, the question pool looks pretty intimidating when i browse through it. like theres a lot of stuff about ohms law and feed lines and propagation that i kind of glazed over for the Tech exam.

i guess my actual question is how much time do people usually spend studying and is there like a recommended way to go about it? i tried looking at a couple youtube videos but some of them are pretty old and i wasnt sure if the pool changed recently. also is it worth trying to do Extra at the same time or is that overkill

honestly the General isnt that bad if you put maybe 3-4 weeks in. i used HamStudy dot org almost exclusively and just hammered the practice tests every day for like 20-30 minutes. the math stuff looks scarier than it is, theres really only a handful of actual calculation questions and once you see the same ones a few times you kind of just remember the answers anyway. the pool did get updated not that long ago so double check which version youre studying, the site will tell you.

i wouldnt bother trying to cram for Extra at the same time unless youre just that kind of person. i did General first, spent a couple months actually getting on 40m and 20m, then went back and did Extra when i was ready. made more sense to me that way because by then i actually understood why some of the Extra stuff mattered.

just passed mine like two weeks ago so this is fresh for me lol. the propagation questions tripped me up at first but once you get the basic idea of what the different bands do and why it kind of clicks. 40m at night goes way further than during the day, 10m does weird stuff during solar max, etc. dont overthink it. i think i studied for maybe 2 and a half weeks total and passed with a comfortable margin. the hardest part for me was honestly just scheduling the VE session, took a while to find one that wasnt too far away