so ive been a tech for about two years now and honestly i mostly just use my HT for local repeaters and the occasional APRS stuff but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and it sounds pretty cool. problem is i looked at the General question pool and it seems like a LOT of material. like there's stuff about propagation and electrical principles and operating practices and i dont even know where to start.

i guess my main question is how long did it take you guys to actually feel ready for the exam and is there a particular study method that worked. i tried hamstudy.org for a bit and it seems good but im not sure if just doing flashcards is enough or if i should actually understand the theory behind everything. also is there stuff on the test that i should just memorize vs actually understand, because some of the electrical formulas look kind of rough and i never took physics in school

honestly it's not that bad, i was in the same spot maybe three years ago and i think i studied for like three weeks casually before i felt comfortable. hamstudy is genuinely good, just keep doing practice exams until you're consistently hitting like 85% or better and you'll probably be fine on test day. the actual exam felt easier than the practice ones to me for some reason.

for the electrical stuff i wouldnt stress too hard about deriving everything from scratch, a lot of it is just recognizing the formula and knowing which one applies. like ohms law and the power formula you kinda want to actually get, but some of the more obscure filter stuff you can probably just pattern match your way through. the propagation questions are actually kind of interesting once you get into it, that stuff starts making sense when you get on HF and start seeing it happen in real time.

i just upgraded last month so this is super fresh for me lol. i used the gordon west book plus hamstudy and that combo worked pretty well. took me maybe 6 weeks but i was only studying like 20 minutes a night so your mileage may vary. passed with an 88 i think.

one thing i'll say is dont sleep on actually understanding the band plan stuff because once you get your General ticket and you're trying to figure out where you're allowed to operate on 40m or whatever it actually matters in real life not just on the test