so ive been wanting to get my technician license for a while now and finally decided to just do it. my brother in law has been a ham for like 20 years and he keeps telling me to just memorize the question pool but that feels like cheating somehow? i dunno. i picked up the ARRL technician manual from the library and its honestly kind of overwhelming, theres so much in there that feels like it doesnt matter for the actual exam.

anyway i guess what im asking is, do people actually read through all that stuff or do most folks just use one of those practice test websites and call it good. i found hamstudy.org and it seems decent but im second guessing myself. also some of the electrical theory questions are pretty confusing to me, like i get the basics but ohms law and stuff starts to make my head spin when they start combining it with other formulas. is that a big chunk of the test or can i kind of skim that section

honest answer: the question pool method works fine and theres no shame in it. the pool is public, the exam questions come straight from it word for word, so if you know the pool you know the exam. hamstudy is what i used and i passed first try no problem. just do the practice tests until youre consistently getting like 85% or better and youll be good, the passing score is only 74% which is 26 out of 35 questions.

the electrical theory stuff, yeah theres a handful of questions on ohms law and maybe some basic power calculations but its not a huge portion. i remember maybe 4 or 5 questions out of 35 being actual math. if you just memorize which formula to use for which type of question youre mostly fine even if you dont fully understand why. not saying thats ideal but for getting your ticket it works. once youre actually on the air you pick up a lot more anyway.

I just took mine last month so pretty fresh for me. I basically did hamstudy every night for two weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes, and passed fine. I did skim the ARRL book for the sections I kept getting wrong just to understand it better but I didn't read the whole thing cover to cover, thats probably overkill for tech.

the thing that tripped me up was some of the band plan and frequency stuff, like knowing which portions of which bands techs are allowed to use on HF. theres a few questions about that and I kept mixing them up. worth paying extra attention to that section in the pool.