so ive been a General for about two years now and i keep telling myself im gonna upgrade but never actually do it. my buddy finally talked me into scheduling the test for next month and now im kind of panicking about the theory stuff. i went through the question pool and some of it is totally fine, like the operating procedures and regulations i pretty much know already from just being on the air. but then theres all this stuff about phase locked loops and impedance matching and filter design and honestly my eyes kind of glaze over. i did okay in math in school but that was a long time ago and i never really studied electronics formally. is there any particular chunk of the theory i should really dig into vs stuff that can kind of just be memorized? or is it mostly just memorize the pool at this point anyway

honestly for the exam itself you can get away with just hammering the question pool. hamstudy.org will tell you when youre consistently passing practice tests and at that point youre probably ready. that said, the filter stuff and the transmission line theory actually makes way more sense if you spend like an hour with the ARRL Extra Class License Manual, not even to study for the test but just because once you see the diagrams it clicks and then you stop dreading those questions. the math on the actual exam is never that brutal, its usually plug and chug with the formula right there in context. dont overthink it, you already know more than you think you do from two years on the air.

i just passed mine like six weeks ago and the thing that tripped me up the most was the op-amp and oscillator circuit questions, not because theyre super hard but i just hadnt really looked at them and a few of them are kind of worded weird. the regulatory stuff for Extra is actually pretty interesting once you realize youre mostly learning about the privileges youre about to get, like the CW and phone sub-bands open up and it makes more sense when you see it on a band plan. good luck with it, the test itself felt way less scary than i expected