so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam. i downloaded the question pool from the arrl website i think, or maybe it was hamstudy.org, i forget. anyway there's like 400 something questions and i dont even know where to start. a friend told me to just memorize the answers without worrying about understanding them and another person said thats a terrible idea and you should actually learn the material. im kind of leaning toward just drilling the questions because i work a lot and dont have a ton of time but i also dont want to feel completely lost once i actually get on the air. does anyone have advice on what actually worked for them? i have like 3 weeks before the exam date

hamstudy.org is honestly the way to go, its free and the spaced repetition thing it does works really well. i passed mine without buying any books at all, just did like 20-30 minutes a day on that site for about two weeks. the question pool for tech isnt that bad, a lot of it is common sense stuff once you read it a couple times. the electrical theory questions tripped me up at first but once you understand ohms law the rest kind of clicks. dont stress too much about memorizing without understanding, for tech level you dont really need to go super deep, just enough to know why the answer is what it is and itll stick better anyway

Three weeks is plenty of time. I used the ARRL Technician manual back when I studied and it was decent but honestly kind of dry. The real trick is just doing practice exams over and over until youre consistently hitting 85 or better, the actual passing score is 74% so once youre well above that in practice you should be fine on test day. One thing I'd say is dont skip the section on repeater operation and frequencies even if it feels boring, there's usually a handful of questions from that area and they're easy points if you just read through it once. Good luck, the test really isn't that hard and most people pass first try.