I'm a General class looking to upgrade to Extra next year. I've heard the theory sections are pretty heavy - especially the RF circuit analysis and advanced antenna topics. For those who recently passed, did you find the HamStudy.org approach sufficient, or did you need the full ARRL manual? Also curious about time investment - saw one post mentioning 30-40 hours of study time.

My main motivation is getting access to those Extra-only DX segments on 20M and 15M during contest weekends. Worth the effort?

HamStudy.org was excellent for me - the explanations for each question in their app are really well done and I barely touched my ARRL manual. Focus on retrieval practice - spend most of your time in quiz mode pulling answers out of your head rather than just reading. The Extra privileges are absolutely worth it for contesting!

I spent about 50 hours total but could have done it in less. You only need 37 correct answers to pass, not all 50, so you don't need to master every single topic. The circuit analysis stuff looks scary but most questions have memory tricks in the explanations.

The Extra-only segments are still the best frequencies for working DX stations on both CW and phone - that's where the DXpeditions concentrate their operations. As someone who does a lot of DX chasing, those extra 25 kHz segments make a real difference in finding clear frequencies.