ok so i've been interested in ham radio for like a year now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked up some stuff online but there's so much conflicting info about whether to start with technician or just go straight for general, and i dont even know what the difference really means practically speaking. like what can you actually DO with each one. also i saw some people saying you can just memorize the question pool and pass without really learning anything and other people saying thats a bad idea. idk i feel like i just want to pass the test and then figure out the actual radio stuff after. is that how most people do it? and is hamstudy.org actually good or is there something better. sorry if this is a dumb question

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere. so hamstudy.org is genuinely the best free resource out there for most people, i used it for all three of my exams and it works well because it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills those harder. the question pool approach is totally valid for Technician honestly, the questions aren't that tricky and once you've done a few hundred practice rounds you'll recognize them on the real test. General has some more involved stuff about propagation and feedlines where actually understanding it helps, but you can still mostly memorize your way through if you want.

as for what you can do with each license, Tech gets you all the VHF and UHF privileges which is fine for local repeater stuff and things like APRS, but HF is basically locked except for a small slice of 10 meters. General opens up most of the HF bands which is where you can actually talk to people in other countries and stuff. some people do go straight for General but honestly just knock out Tech first, the test sessions usually let you sit for multiple elements the same day so you could do both back to back if you study for both. find a local club, a lot of them run free study sessions and the VEs there are pretty helpful.

i did mine like three months ago so pretty fresh in my memory. i just used hamstudy and watched some of the ham radio crash course videos on youtube when i didnt understand something, that combo worked fine. took me maybe two weeks of casual studying, probably an hour a night. the test itself was way less stressful than i expected, its 35 questions for Tech and you need 26 right so theres some room to mess up. the math questions scared me but theres only a few and honestly if you just memorize the specific formulas they ask about youre fine, they dont throw curveballs.