so ive been a Tech for about two years now and honestly ive just been doing VHF/UHF stuff, some APRS, the usual. but lately ive been getting curious about HF and everyone says you need General for that so here i am.

my question is basically how hard is the jump from Tech to General. like i studied for maybe a week and a half for my Tech exam and passed no problem but i've heard General is a different beast. the question pool seems way bigger and theres stuff in there about propagation and like... operating procedures i've never had to think about before. also some electrical theory stuff that looked pretty intimidating when i skimmed the pool.

is there a specific study method people recommend or do most people just grind the question pool and hope for the right ones show up. i downloaded ham study and been doing practice tests but im only hitting like 60-65% right now and the real exam feels scary. any advice from people who actually went through this recently would be helpful

honestly it's not that bad once you stop trying to memorize every single thing and actually understand what the questions are getting at. the electrical theory stuff like reactance and impedance tripped me up at first but once i watched a couple youtube videos on it it clicked pretty fast. i think the hardest part for most tech upgrades is the band plan stuff and knowing what modes are allowed where, thats just pure memorization there's no shortcut.

i went from 60-something percent to passing comfortably in like three weeks just doing 20-30 questions a day on ham study. the thing is after a while you start recognizing the wrong answers as much as the right ones which helps a lot. just keep grinding it, you're closer than you think. and once you get that HF priv its a whole different world, 40m alone is worth it.

took mine last spring, came from Tech same as you. i will say the propagation questions were the ones that got me because i just didnt have any real world context for it yet. like sure i knew what a skip zone was from reading but i hadnt actually used HF so it was all abstract. i ended up just drilling the pool until the numbers stuck. 65% on practice tests is actually pretty reasonable this early, dont panic.