so ive been a general for about two years now and ive been going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. mostly i want the HF privileges, the extra 25khz or whatever it is on 75/80m and the CW segments on 40. my buddy keeps telling me the theory section is brutal and i should just study the question pool and not try to understand it but that feels wrong to me.

the thing is i actually do want to understand the theory, like the filter stuff and the impedance matching and all that, not just memorize answers. but i also have a full time job and two kids so im not exactly swimming in study time. anyone gone through it recently and have thoughts on how long it actually took them, and whether its worth trying to actually learn the material vs just grinding the pool

did mine about 18 months ago and honestly your buddy isnt wrong that you CAN just memorize the pool, but i think you'd be doing yourself a disservice. the stuff about transmission lines and smith charts and the filter design questions, once it clicks it actually makes everything else make more sense. like i finally understood why my antenna tuner was doing what it was doing.

i used the ARRL Extra Class License Manual and also Ham Radio Prep online, did maybe 45 minutes a day for about 6 weeks and passed with a pretty comfortable margin. the math isnt as scary as people make it out to be, most of it is just knowing which formula to plug numbers into. the hardest part for me was the transistor biasing stuff and some of the oscillator circuit questions, that took a few passes to get into my head. but yeah absolutely worth it, the expanded privileges feel nice and honestly i just liked having all three tickets.

i just passed mine like 3 weeks ago so this is fresh lol. took me longer than i expected, probably closer to 3 months but i was only studying maybe 20-30 min at a time whenever i could. the thing that tripped me up was i kept confusing myself trying to deeply understand everything from scratch instead of just getting familiar enough with the concepts that the answers made sense. like you dont need to derive the resonant frequency formula from first principles, you just need to know what happens when you change the capacitance in an LC circuit you know

the exam itself felt totally manageable once i had the pool down. and yeah the HF privileges are nice, finally got on 160m which ive been wanting to do forever