so i decided i want to finally get my technician license and ive been looking around online for study materials and honestly its kind of overwhelming. theres like 5 different websites and apps and books and i dont know which ones are actually worth using vs which ones are just noise. a friend at work said he just memorized the question pool which seems kind of lazy but also maybe thats how you do it? i dunno. im mostly interested in eventually doing stuff on 2 meters and maybe getting into some satellite stuff down the road but right now i just need to pass the test. does anyone have a specific thing they used that actually worked?

honestly your coworker isnt wrong, the question pool approach works and thats basically what everyone does. the FCC question pool for Technician is publicly available and the actual exam questions are pulled straight from it, so if you can get through the whole pool and understand why the answers are what they are, youre gonna pass. i used HamStudy.org when i was studying and it was pretty solid, does spaced repetition so it keeps drilling you on the ones you keep getting wrong. took me maybe 3 weeks of like 20 minutes a day and i passed with only a couple wrong.

the Gordon West book is popular too if you want something more structured, explains the reasoning behind stuff which helps it actually stick. but if youre just trying to pass fast, question pool + hamStudy is probably your fastest route. the satellite and weak signal stuff makes way more sense once you have the license and start poking around anyway.

i passed mine like 8 months ago and just used the ARRL study guide, think it was like 20 bucks on amazon. wasnt anything fancy but it goes through everything section by section and has practice questions at the end of each chapter. what I'd say is dont stress too much about fully understanding the electrical theory parts right away, like the ohms law stuff and the formulas. you can learn all that later when its actually relevant to whatever you end up doing. for the exam just know the forumlas enough to plug numbers in and youll be fine.