so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has all this antenna stuff in his yard and got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you need a license to transmit? which makes sense i guess. anyway i found out theres like multiple levels of license and im not sure which one to go for first or if i need to do them in order or what.

i downloaded some app called ham study or something like that and it has practice questions but honestly some of them are really confusing and i dont understand the explanations. like the electrical theory stuff especially. do i need to actually understand all of it or can i just memorize the answers? the pool is like 400 something questions right? how long did it take you guys to study before you felt ready to actually sit for the test

yeah you do have to do them in order, tech first then general then extra. but tech is definitely the easiest one and honestly the electrical theory questions arent that bad once you get a feel for the patterns. theres a handful of ohms law type questions and if you just remember E=IR and the power formula you can work most of them out instead of memorizing.

i used hamstudy.org when i was studying and just ran through practice tests over and over until i was consistently hitting like 85% or better, took me maybe two weeks of casual studying in the evenings. the real test pool is 426 questions and they pull 35 for the actual exam so yeah theres some memorization involved but the site does a good job of weighting the ones you keep getting wrong. look up if theres a local club near you too because a lot of them run license exam sessions pretty regularly and some even have a study class before it.

i just passed my tech like 3 months ago so pretty fresh for me lol. honestly i barely understood half the theory and still passed, i think i got a 91% or something. just did hamstudy every day for like 10 days, maybe 30 mins at a time. the questions repeat a lot once you been through it a few times and it starts clicking. dont stress too much about understanding every single thing, you can learn the why later once you actually have a radio in your hand and start messing around.