so ive been a general for about two years now and my elmer keeps telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but honestly i dont know if its worth the effort. like i mainly do HF phone on 40 and 20 meters and i already have access to most of what i want. the extra portions of those bands seem pretty quiet from what i can tell when i listen around.

but then part of me wants to understand the theory better anyway. i looked at the question pool and some of that stuff is way over my head, the transmission line stuff and the filter design questions and whatever that whole section on oscillators is about. i took electronics in high school like 15 years ago so its not completely foreign but its been a while.

i guess my question is, is the extra exam mostly just memorizing answers or do you actually need to understand the theory to pass it? and did getting it change how you operate or think about the hobby at all? i cant tell if im just being lazy or if general is honestly fine for what i do

honestly the theory stuff is more learnable than it looks. i was in the same boat, general for like three years and kept putting it off. what finally got me was just working through the hamstudy site every day for maybe 20 minutes. the oscillator and filter questions start making sense once you see them enough times, and some of it you genuinely start to understand rather than just memorize, especially the impedance matching stuff which actually clicked for me when i started thinking about why my antenna tuner was doing what it was doing.

as for whether it changes how you operate, kind of yeah. i dont think i suddenly became a better operator but i started paying more attention to what was actually happening rf-wise, like why certain times of day certain bands open up the way they do, the propagation theory in the pool helped with that. the extra band segments are nice but youre right that theyre not always packed. the cw end of 20 is usually where the dx is though if you ever get into that.

i just passed mine last month so this is pretty fresh for me. the exam is hard but not impossible, the math questions were what scared me most but theres really only a handful of formulas you need and they come up in patterns. reactance, resonance, that kind of thing. i used the gordon west book and hamstudy and took probably six weeks to feel ready.

did it change anything, i mean i now have the little AE on my callsign which feels good i guess lol. practically speaking i havent done anything different yet but im planning to get into some of the lower parts of 40 phone where it gets less crowded during contests. so yeah id say go for it if youre even half curious, worst case you learn some stuff