so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for the technician exam. downloaded the ARRL study guide pdf and honestly its a lot more than i expected. like i know i need to learn the question pool but some of this stuff about electrical theory is going way over my head and im not sure if i should be spending equal time on everything or if certain sections actually show up more on the test than others.

also not sure if i should just do hamstudy.org or if the actual book is worth reading cover to cover first. my test is in about 3 weeks so i dont have a ton of time. any advice from people who went through this recently would be helpful

honestly hamstudy.org is probably 80% of what you need. just drill the questions every day and when you miss one, read the explanation, dont just memorize the answer. the electrical theory stuff like ohms law and the basic antenna questions, those are worth actually understanding because you'll use that stuff after you pass too. the regulatory stuff about frequencies and what technicians can do is also pretty heavily tested so dont skip that.

i did about 10-15 minutes a day for like 2 weeks and passed with room to spare. the real test pulls directly from the published question pool so if you can consistently score above 80% on hamstudy you're probably fine. three weeks is plenty of time honestly.

yeah what he said about hamstudy. thats basically all i used. the ARRL book is good if you actually want to understand the why behind everything but for just passing the test its kind of overkill. one thing i'll add is dont freak out about the math questions, theres really only a handful and the formulas are simple once you do them a few times. V=IR and the decibel stuff mostly. just make sure you know your band privleges for technicians because that trips a lot of people up, like knowing you get phone on 10m but only a small portion of it, stuff like that.