so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing 2m/70cm stuff with my handheld and a base station i built up. its fun but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and the whole idea of actually talking to people in other states or even other countries with like 100 watts just sounds really cool to me.

my question is i guess, how different is the General exam from the Tech exam? i remember the Tech pool being kinda rough in some spots but i passed first try with maybe 2 weeks of studying. is General way harder or is it more of the same? i downloaded the question pool PDF and it looks like theres a lot of electrical stuff and propagation questions which i dont really understand yet. should i just use the HamStudy website again or is there something better for General specifically? also is there anything about the actual HF privileges that i should know before i even bother getting the license, like do i need totally different equipment or can some radios do both

General isnt that bad honestly. I went from Tech to General in about 3 weeks of casual studying, like 20-30 minutes a night on HamStudy and reading through the ARRL General manual. The electrical theory questions look scarier than they are because a lot of them you can just memorize the answer without really understanding the math behind it, which isnt ideal but it works for passing the test.

The propagation stuff is actually pretty interesting once you start reading about it, 20 meters behaves totally different from 40 at night and once that clicks the questions kind of answer themselves. As for equipment yeah you will almost certainly need a different radio, your HT isnt going to do HF. Most people start with something like an IC-7300 or a used FT-857 or whatever fits the budget. The 857 does VHF and UHF too which some people like. Just dont go buy anything until you actually have the ticket in hand, gives you time to research properly.

i literally just did this last month so feel free to ask me stuff. the exam felt about the same difficulty as tech to me, maybe slightly harder but not by a lot. i used hamStudy almost exclusively and just kept drilling the questions until i was consistently hitting like 85% or higher on the practice tests and then i went and sat for it. passed with a 30/35 i think.

one thing that tripped me up was the operating procedures stuff, like which part of the band you're supposed to be on for phone vs digital vs CW, theres a band plan chart in the ARRL book that helped a lot. and yeah you'll want an HF rig, there's no getting around that. i picked up a used TS-480 and its been great for getting started.