so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like ive hit a wall a little bit. i mean theres still stuff to do on VHF and i do some satellite stuff occasionally but everyone keeps telling me to just go get my General so i can actually get on HF. i tried listening to 40m on my friends rig last weekend and it just kind of blew my mind how much activity there is down there.

anyway i guess my question is how hard is the General exam compared to Tech. i remember the Tech exam being not too bad, studied with HamStudy for like 3 weeks and passed first try. is General more of the same or is there actually harder stuff in there. i heard theres more math involved? i really dont want to fail in front of people at the testing session lol

also wondering if there are specific topics i should focus on or if its just grind the question pool like i did before. any advice appreciated, trying to maybe take the test sometime in the next month or two

the math isnt that bad honestly, like there's some ohms law stuff and a bit about decibels but nothing you need a calculator for if you just memorize the common conversions. i was way more worried about it than i needed to be. the propagation stuff tripped me up a little, like understanding why 10m is great during solar max but goes dead otherwise, stuff like that. but if you already passed Tech you clearly know how to study for these tests so just do the same thing.

HamStudy is fine but i also really liked the ARRL General study guide, read through it once just to get the concepts and then drilled questions for maybe 2 weeks. passed with like 5 wrong i think. the pool isnt that much bigger than Tech and a lot of it is honestly just common sense once you understand the basics. you'll be fine

General is a step up but nothing crazy. the part that catches people is the operating privileges section, there's a lot of questions about which frequencies you can use as a General vs Extra and it gets a little tedious to memorize all the band edges. just drill those until they're automatic and the rest kind of falls into place.

once you get it though, 40m is addicting. especially at night when the band opens up and you start hearing stations from europe or south america just casually sitting there. first time i worked a DX station on phone i think i sat there for a few minutes just kind of staring at the radio. anyway yeah just go take it, worst case you fail and you learn what you got wrong and take it again, no big deal