so my buddy has been into ham radio for a few years and finally talked me into getting my ticket. i picked up a copy of the ARRL technician manual from the library but honestly its kind of overwhelming and i dont even know if thats the right book to start with or if i should just be drilling the question pool directly. like is there a better way to approach this than just reading every chapter? i feel like theres a lot of electrical theory stuff in there that i probably dont need to know that deeply just to pass the test. also i saw something about HamStudy.org and some app called Ham Radio Prep, has anyone used those and do they actually work? just want to get this done in a reasonable amount of time without losing my mind over ohms law

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need if your main goal is just passing the exam. i didnt even crack a book, spent maybe two weeks doing the flash cards every night for like 20-30 minutes and passed with a pretty comfortable margin. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those which is really helpful. the electrical theory questions are kind of annoying but there arent that many of them and once you see the same ones cycle through a few times you just kind of memorize the answers anyway. dont stress too much about actually understanding every single thing, you can dig deeper into the theory stuff after you get your callsign if you want to. the pool only has 35 questions on the actual test so the odds are pretty manageable once youve gone through everything a couple times

yeah the ARRL book is fine but its definitely written more for actually learning the hobby than just cramming for the test. I used it as a supplement but did most of my prep with the question pool directly. one thing that helped me was not just memorizing answers but at least sort of understanding the why behind the rules questions, the FCC part 97 stuff especially, because those tend to make more intuitive sense once you get the logic and then you dont have to brute force memorize them. the math questions people freak out about but honestly on the tech exam its pretty basic, ohms law is just V=IR and theyll give you numbers where you can almost figure it out without even doing math if you know the ballpark. give yourself 3-4 weeks if youre doing it casually, you'll be fine