so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like im starting to hit a wall with what i can do on 2m and 70cm. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just go take the general already but im kind of nervous about the electrical theory stuff. i was never great at math in school and from what i remember the tech exam wasnt too bad but i heard general has more actual calculations and stuff like that.

i downloaded the gordon west book from the library and flipped through it and some of it looks familiar but then theres sections on like impedance matching and propagation stuff that looks pretty intimidating. has anyone here gone from tech to general recently and how long did you study? and also once i pass what are the first things i should actually try to do on HF because i dont even really know where to start with that either. i have a baofeng and an old icom ic-718 i got at a hamfest that i havent even turned on yet because it felt pointless without the license

honestly the general exam is not that bad, i was in the same boat as you, thought the math would kill me but the actual calculations they test you on are pretty straightforward once you just memorize the formulas. like you dont need to deeply understand why the formula works you just need to know it and plug numbers in. i used hamstudy.org for like 3 weeks maybe 30 minutes a day and passed with only a handful wrong. the pool of questions is finite so if you just drill the question pool you'll be fine.

as for the IC-718 dude turn that thing on. that radio is a solid HF rig and you're sitting on it doing nothing lol. once you get your upgrade just start with 40 meters in the evening, there's always people on SSB and if you find yourself on the general portion of 40m you'll hear plenty of activity. 14.225 on 20 meters is kind of a classic spot too. just listen for a while before you transmit, get a feel for how people do it. you'll figure it out fast.

i passed general like two months ago after being a tech for almost a year and a half. the propagation stuff i was also worried about but honestly in the actual exam context its more like trivia than real understanding. like you dont need to know exactly why the F2 layer does what it does you just need to know which one it is and roughly what frequency range it affects.

the one thing that tripped me up a little was the question about license privileges and band plans, theres a lot of them and some are weirdly specific. i'd make sure you really drill those. and yeah get on HF as soon as you can, waiting around with that 718 in your shack doing nothing sounds painful honestly