ok so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and my neighbor who has a big antenna setup told me i should just go for the technician class first. i downloaded the question pool PDF from the ARRL website but honestly its just overwhelming, like 400+ questions and i dont even know what half the words mean. do people actually memorize all of these or is there a better way to go about it. ive heard some people say just use the HamStudy website and others say get the actual book. i work nights so i only have maybe an hour or two during the day to study and im trying to take the exam sometime in the next month or so. any tips from people who actually went through this recently would be helpful, especially if theres stuff on the exam that trips people up

honestly the question pool looks scarier than it is. when i did mine a few years back i just used HamStudy dot org every day for like two weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes a session, and passed no problem. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and keeps drilling those so it kinda does the work for you. i wouldnt stress about understanding every single concept right away, some of the electrical theory stuff like ohms law and the decibel questions just takes a little repetition before it clicks. the RF safety section tripped me up at first but theres really only like 4 or 5 questions in that pool that show up and once you see the pattern its fine. if you want the book the ARRL Tech manual is decent but i found it a bit slow for how i learn. the question pool method is honestly enough to pass, you can dig deeper into the theory stuff after you get your callsign

so anyway i passed mine last spring and the one thing nobody told me was that the actual exam questions are pulled word for word from the pool, like exactly word for word, so if you know the pool you know the exam. i used Ham Radio Prep which costs a few bucks but it has little videos explaining each section which helped me a lot with the antenna and propagation stuff since i had zero background in any of this. the electrical questions look intimidating but there are only a handful of actual math problems and they give you a calculator at most VE sessions so dont panic about those. good luck with it, its not that bad once you get going