so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly im getting a little bored just doing local repeater stuff and the occasional simplex. started reading about HF and now im kind of obsessed with the idea of actually making contacts on like 40 or 20 meters. my elmer keeps telling me to just go take the general already but i dont really know where to start with studying.

the tech exam felt pretty manageable, i used hamstudy.org and just drilled questions for like 2 weeks and passed fine. is general roughly the same deal or is there a lot more actual understanding you need vs just memorizing? i looked at some of the questions and some of the electrical stuff looks kind of intimidating, the stuff about impedance and reactance and all that. do i actually need to understand it or can i just memorize the answers again

also once i pass, whats the realistic path to actually getting on HF without spending a ton of money right away

general is definitely a step up from tech but not by as much as people make it sound. the electrical theory stuff looks scary but honestly theres only so many questions they can ask about it and if you use hamstudy or the qrz practice exams you'll see them cycle through pretty fast. i spent maybe 3 weeks on it, probably an hour a night, and passed with a decent margin. the hardest part for me was the operating procedures and some of the propagation stuff, not the math.

as for getting on HF without spending a lot, used radios are the way to go. an ft-757 or one of the older icom 706s can be had for not much on qrz.com classifieds or ebay if you're patient. a decent wire antenna like a simple dipole cut for 40m can be built for almost nothing and 40 meters is a great band to start on, especially in the evenings. you dont need a fancy antenna tuner right away either, just cut it close to resonance and you're fine on most rigs with a decent built in tuner

i was in the exact same spot last year lol. took general about 6 months after tech and yeah hamstudy is fine, same approach works. the impedance stuff i just memorized the formulas enough to recognize which answer was right without really understanding why and that got me through it. probably should learn it properly at some point but anyway

my first HF setup was just a used ic-7300 i found locally and a random wire up in a tree and i was making contacts the first night. 40 meters is super forgiving, especially after dark you can work all over the place even with a janky antenna