so ive been a general for about 3 years now and ive been going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. i know a lot of people just use the question pool and memorize their way through it but some of the stuff in there like the filter theory and the transmission line equations honestly looks like stuff i should probably actually understand at some point anyway

my main thing is i mostly do HF, some SSB on 40 and 20, occasional digital. i dont really have a burning need for the extra HF allocations right now but i keep seeing those little slices of 40m and 80m that i cant use and it bugs me a little. is the theory in the extra actually useful day to day or is it just license exam stuff that you never think about again once youre done

also how hard is it really compared to general, that jump felt pretty significant when i took it

honestly the jump from general to extra felt bigger to me on paper than it did in practice. i was really worried about the math sections, the LC circuit stuff and the reactance formulas, but when you actually sit down with the material it starts clicking faster than you'd expect especially if you've been operating for a few years because you already have context for a lot of it.

as for whether the theory is worth learning vs just memorizing, i'd say do both kind of at the same time. like don't try to deeply understand every single question but when something comes up that you actually want to know, go down that rabbit hole. the transmission line stuff especially stub matching and standing waves, that actually helped me troubleshoot some feedline weirdness i had going on. so it wasnt just test material for me

the 40m extra portion is surprisingly nice btw, less qrm down there most evenings. that alone was worth it for me after a while

i just passed mine like two months ago so this is fresh. i used hamstudy and just drilled the pool but i did look up the actual explanations for stuff i kept getting wrong instead of just memorizing the answer. the filter shape factor questions and the op-amp stuff i had to actually read about because i could not get them to stick otherwise

the privileges are nice but tbh i went for it mostly because i wanted to be done with licensing forever lol. full privileges feels good even if i dont use all of it