so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is licensed and he keeps telling me to just get my ticket already. i finally decided to go for it but honestly i dont even know where to start. i looked up the question pool online and theres like 400+ questions and i kind of panicked a little. do i need to actually understand all of it or is it more like just memorizing the answers? and are there certain sections that trip people up more than others because some of the electrical stuff looks pretty intimidating. i took basic physics in high school like 15 years ago so im not totally clueless but its definitely been a while. any tips on study guides or apps or whatever would be helpful, i just dont want to show up to the exam and completely blank out

honestly the question pool looks way scarier than it actually is. the tech exam is only 35 questions pulled from that pool and you need 26 right to pass, so theres actually a decent amount of wiggle room. HamStudy.org is what most people recommend and it really does work, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those. the Gordon West study guide is pretty popular too if you want something physical to flip through, some people like having a book. dont stress too much about fully understanding the math behind everything like the ohms law stuff, though honestly if you spend like 20 minutes with it you can usually just remember the formulas. the regulatory and operating procedure questions are mostly just common sense once you read through them once or twice. give yourself a couple weeks of casual studying and youll probably be fine

i passed mine about four months ago and was in pretty much the same boat. what got me through it was just doing practice exams over and over on that hamstudy site, like i barely even read the study material i just did tests until i was consistently getting 90% or above and then went and took the real thing. the antenna and propagation questions were the ones i kept missing at first but they kind of clicked after a while. one thing i'd say is dont overthink the electricity section, theres really only a handful of formulas that actually show up and once you see them a few times theyre not bad. good luck, it really is not that hard