so ive been a tech for about two years now and mostly just doing local VHF stuff and some APRS, but ive been wanting to get on HF for a while and finally decided to just go for the general exam. I downloaded the question pool and honestly its kind of overwhelming, theres a lot of stuff in there about propagation and operating procedures that i kind of half understand but not really, plus all the electrical theory stuff.

my question is basically where do people usually focus when studying for general, like is there specific sections that trip people up or stuff thats actually important vs stuff you can kind of just memorize without really getting it. ive been using hamstudy.org which seems decent but im not sure if thats enough or if i should get like a book too. been at it for maybe two weeks and im passing practice exams maybe 70% of the time which i think is ok but not sure

also once i pass, what HF bands am i actually going to have access to right away, i know general gets a lot but i always get confused about which portions of 40 and 20 meters i can use vs what extra gets. not a huge deal just curious

hamstudy is honestly probably enough if you keep at it, thats mostly how I studied when i upgraded a few years back. the areas that got me were the band privileges (exactly what you said) and some of the electrical theory around impedance and that kind of thing. the propagation stuff is actually pretty interesting once it clicks and its not that hard to pick up.

for the bands, as a general you get big chunks of 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters for phone, not the very bottom of some of them which is extra class territory, but honestly theres plenty of room to operate and you wont feel boxed in at all. 20 meters is where i'd start, its usually pretty active and you can hear stations from all over the place even with a modest antenna. just keep grinding the practice tests and when youre hitting 80% consistently you're probably ready to go sit for it

I just did this like three months ago so it's pretty fresh. Honestly the thing that helped me most was just doing the practice exams over and over on hamstudy until I understood WHY the answers were right not just memorizing them, especially for the electrical stuff because that comes up in weird ways. The band plan questions I just flat out memorized, there's no shortcut there.

70% passing rate on practice tests is a little low id want to be closer to 85-90 before I went to a session just so I wasn't stressed out. give it another week or two. and yeah once you pass you can start operating immediately, you dont have to wait for a new license to show up in the FCC database or anything, just show up on 20m SSB and have fun with it