so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like ive hit a wall a little bit. i mostly just do local repeaters and some simplex stuff but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working dx and i guess i want to get in on that. my buddy pete has a general and he says the exam isnt that bad but he also said that about the tech exam and i almost failed that one lol

anyway i started looking at the question pool and some of it makes sense but then theres all this stuff about propagation and operating procedures that i dont really understand. like i get the basic concept of skywave and stuff but when the questions start talking about which bands do what at different times of day my brain kind of goes sideways. is there a good way to study for this or should i just do the ham study website and grind questions until it sticks

also what HF bands can i even use as a general, i looked it up but the chart i found was kind of confusing with all the sub-bands and stuff

the general exam is definitely a step up from tech but its not as scary as people make it out to be. i used hamStudy.org and just did like 20-30 questions a day for about three weeks and passed pretty comfortably. the propagation stuff does take a little while to click but once it does it kind of makes sense on its own terms, like once you understand that higher frequency bands skip farther and that 40m is generally better at night than 10m it starts to feel logical instead of random

for bands as a general youre basically looking at good chunks of 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters plus some of 20 which is honestly the workhorse band for a lot of HF work. you wont have the full privileges a extra class has but theres plenty of room to operate and have fun. 40m is where id start once you upgrade, there's always activity there day or night and you can hit pretty good distances without needing a fancy antenna setup. just make sure you read up on the phone vs cw segments so you dont accidentally transmit in the wrong part of the band

honestly just grind the question pool, thats what i did. i think i went through it maybe twice on ham study and then took a practice test a few times until i was consistently hitting like 85% or better and then just went and sat for it. passed first try. some of the electrical theory questions are a little annoying but there arent that many of them and you can kind of learn which answers to pick even if you dont totally get why

the HF stuff after is where it gets fun though, first time i made a contact on 20m with a guy in germany using just a wire antenna in my backyard i was pretty hooked