so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and mostly just been doing 2m/70cm stuff with my local club, some APRS, occasional simplex. figured its time to actually upgrade so i can get on HF. been using hamstudystudy.com and the gordon west book and honestly the pass rate on my practice tests is like 75-80% which i know should be fine but there are certain sections that just dont click for me at all.

the electrical theory stuff is where i keep losing points. like i get ohms law and the basic stuff but when it gets into the LC circuits and reactance questions i kind of just freeze up. is there a trick to remembering which way inductive vs capacitive reactance works or do people just kind of memorize the answer patterns? also the propagation questions for HF are a bit weird to me because ive never actually operated on HF so i dont have any feel for how the bands actually behave.

anyway the test is in about 3 weeks and im mostly just wondering if 75-80% on the practice tests is enough or should i be higher before i sit down for the real thing? and is the actual exam harder than the practice ones or about the same difficulty

75-80 is honestly probably fine, the question pool is the question pool so if youre hitting that consistently you should pass. the actual exam isnt harder or easier than the practice tests because its literally drawn from the same pool, thats how it works. i was getting like 72% before i sat for mine and still passed with room to spare.

for the reactance stuff — the way i always thought about it is that inductors resist change in current and capacitors resist change in voltage, and from there you can kind of reason through which one has higher reactance at high vs low frequencies. inductive reactance goes up with frequency, capacitive goes down. theres no real shortcut, i just drew it out on paper like 20 times until it stuck. the good news is on the exam youre only going to see a handful of those questions and if you get the rest right it doesnt really matter.

the propagation stuff will make way more sense once you actually start using HF, which youre about to do so dont stress it too much. just memorize the general rules for the exam and the actual feel for the bands will come after.

i just did this like 4 months ago. the LC and reactance questions tripped me up too and what finally helped me was watching some youtube videos on it rather than just reading — something about seeing it visually made it click. cant remember the channel name offhand but just search general class reactance and a few decent ones come up.

also once you get your general you should definitely try 40m at night, thats where i started and the band just kind of opens up in the evening and you can work stations pretty far out even with modest power. its a totally different world from 2m repeaters and honestly way more fun for just randomly calling CQ and seeing what happens.