so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local stuff on 2m and some APRS. but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and making contacts way out of state or even internationally and it sounds really cool. i started looking at the General exam pool and honestly some of it looks intimidating, especially all the stuff about propagation and the electrical theory questions. the Tech exam wasnt too bad but this feels like a big jump.

my question is basically how much time did you guys spend studying before you felt ready and is there a good way to focus on just the stuff thats actually gonna be on the test vs like, trying to learn everything from scratch. i dont have an HF rig yet so i cant really practice any of it hands on. also is the band plan stuff something you just have to memorize or does it kind of make sense once you understand propagation better

honestly the General exam is not as bad as it looks when you first open the question pool. i went from Tech to General in maybe 3 weeks of casual studying, maybe 30-45 minutes a night with HamStudy.org. that site is pretty much all you need, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those. the electrical theory stuff like the impedance questions and the resonance formulas look scary but theres really only so many ways they can ask it and once you see the pattern its fine.

the band plan stuff does start to make more sense once you get even a basic feel for propagation, like why 40m is good at night and 10m can be dead for years and then suddenly open up and you're talking to australia on 5 watts. but for the exam honestly just memorize the phone and CW segments, the question pool repeats itself a lot on that. the propagation questions are actually kind of interesting once you get into it, stuff about the ionosphere and skip distance. i found myself actually wanting to learn that part rather than just cramming it.

yeah just use hamStudy and grind it out, i passed with a few days of studying. the band stuff you mostly just memorize tbh. once you get on HF you'll figure out the rest pretty quick