ok so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it always looked cool to me. he told me i need to pass a test to get a license but i honestly have no idea where to start or what the test even covers. i looked it up briefly and theres like different levels? technician and general and something else i think. do i need to take them all at once or can i just do the first one and go from there. also how hard is the test really, im not super great at math or electronics stuff. is there like a good website or app or something that people use to study. ive got maybe a few weeks before i can even sit for a test so i want to make sure im actually ready and not just wasting the fee

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. so yeah theres three license classes, technician is the entry level one and thats all you need to get started, most people just do that first and then upgrade later if they want. the technician exam is 35 questions multiple choice and you need to get 26 right to pass, so theres actually a decent amount of margin for error which helps take the pressure off a bit.

for studying i always point people to hamstudy.org, its free and it pulls from the actual question pool that the test uses, so youre literally studying the real questions. theres also an app called Ham Radio Prep or you can just use the hamstudy app. the thing people dont realize is the question pool is public, all the answers are right there, so if you just grind through the practice tests for a couple weeks you should be fine even without deep electronics knowledge. some of the math questions can be skipped honestly if youre not comfortable because you only need 26 out of 35.

find a local club too, most of them run test sessions pretty regularly and some even do free license classes. arrl.org has a club finder. good luck, its really not as intimidating as it looks at first

i just passed my tech exam like two months ago so this is still pretty fresh for me. honestly i was way overthinking it. i used hamstudy.org pretty much exclusively and just did practice tests every night for like 2 weeks for maybe 20-30 minutes at a time. once i was consistently hitting 80% or above on the practice tests i felt ready and i passed no problem.

the math stuff theres only a handful of questions and the formulas are pretty simple, ohms law type stuff, but even if you blank on those you can still pass easily. the harder part for me was the regulations questions just because there was a lot to memorize about frequencies and what you can and cant do on each band but again the practice tests help a ton with that. just keep doing them until the answers start feeling familiar