so ive had my technician for about two years now and mostly just been doing local stuff on 2m and 440 but i keep hearing people talk about HF and honestly it sounds like a lot more fun. been thinking about going for my general class but i honestly have no idea how different the exam is from the tech exam or how much studying im looking at. i used the gordon west book for my tech and that worked fine but not sure if thats still the right approach or if theres something better now.

also kind of confused about what i actually get access to after passing, like i know general opens up HF but is it all the bands or just some of them? someone at our club meeting mentioned something about phone privileges on 40m but i wasnt really sure what that meant in practice. anyway if anyone has done this recently and can tell me what to expect that would be great, not even sure exactly what im asking but hopefully someone gets what i mean

honestly the general exam isnt that scary, i was worried too but ended up passing with only about three weeks of studying. the question pool is bigger than tech obviously but a lot of it is stuff you already kind of understand from operating. the main new stuff is propagation, some extra circuit theory, and operating rules for the HF bands. hamstudy.org is what i used, just drilled the questions every day for a bit and it clicked pretty fast.

as for privileges, general doesnt give you everything — extra class gets you the last few slices of some bands — but you get a huge chunk of 40m 20m 15m and 10m for phone which is where most of the action is anyway. 20m especially you can work the whole world on a decent afternoon. once you pass you'll wonder why you waited so long, 2m repeaters are great but theres nothing like making a contact across the atlantic on 20 with a wire antenna in your backyard

just passed mine like six weeks ago so pretty fresh. hamstudy was the main thing i used, did maybe 30-45 mins a day for a couple weeks. some of the electrical theory questions are a bit annoying if youre not an engineer type but you dont really need to understand it deeply just recognize the answers after enough repetition tbh

the HF thing is real though, got on 40m the first weekend after my license came up in the ULS database and made like 8 contacts including one in germany which i was not expecting at all. just had a cheap used ic-7300 and a random wire out the window