so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while and finally decided to just do it and get my ticket. signed up to take the tech exam in like 6 weeks which seemed like plenty of time but now im looking at all the material and honestly a little overwhelmed. there's so much stuff about frequencies and ohms law and i remember basically zero physics from high school.

i found the hamstudy.org site which seems good but someone at a club meeting told me i should also get the ARRL study guide book? is that actually worth buying or is the free online stuff enough. also the question pool thing -- is it really just memorizing the exact questions that are on the test or do i actually need to understand the stuff. some of the electrical theory questions look really hard and i dont know if i should spend a ton of time on those or just try to get through the regulations sections first

sorry if this is a super basic question, just dont know where to start

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need, the book is fine but not necessary unless you really like having something physical to read through. the way hamstudy works is it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those more which is genuinely helpful.

on the theory stuff -- you dont need to deeply understand ohms law to pass, you just need to know enough to answer the specific questions they ask. like if you know E=IR and practice applying it to the few question variations in the pool youll be fine. the pool is published and the actual test questions come directly from it, no surprises. just grind the practice tests until youre consistently hitting 80 or above and youre probably ready. the passing score is 74% so thats 26 out of 35 right.

six weeks is way more than enough time if you put in even like 20-30 minutes a day. i studied for maybe 2 weeks total for mine.

yeah what the other person said about hamstudy is right but i'll add one thing -- dont skip the regulations questions even if they seem boring because there's a LOT of them on the test and they're actually pretty easy points if you just memorize them. stuff like what frequencies technicians can use on HF, power limits, when you have to ID, that kind of thing. it's all just rote memorization but it adds up fast.

the electrical theory tripped me up a little when i was studying, i kept confusing myself on the parallel vs series circuit stuff. what helped me was watching a couple youtube videos on it rather than just reading. ham radio prep channel has some decent free videos that go through the whole question pool section by section if you learn better that way. anyway good luck, the test really isnt that bad once you've done a week or two of practice tests