so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup in his backyard and it got me curious. i looked into it a bit and i guess theres different levels? technician then general then extra or something like that. anyway i dont really know where to start studying or what the test is actually like. is it multiple choice, do you need to know morse code, how hard is it really for someone with basically zero background in electronics. i took one physics class in high school like 15 years ago so thats about it lol. any advice would be great, im not even sure what im asking exactly i just want to point me in the right direction

okay so first thing, no morse code requirement anymore, they dropped that years ago so dont let that scare you off. the technician exam is 35 questions, all multiple choice, and you need to get 26 right to pass. the whole question pool is publicly available which is kind of a cheat code honestly because you can literally just memorize the answers if you want to. HamStudy.org is what most people use these days, its free and it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong. some people bang through it in a week or two if they study a little every day. the electronics stuff does come up but its pretty basic, like they might ask you to calculate something with ohms law but they arent going to throw anything crazy at you. just use hamStudy, take practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 85% or better, and then go find a testing session near you through the ARRL website. the test itself is way less intimidating than you'd think, usually just a few people sitting around a table at someones house or a library

i was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago, zero background in any of this. i used the Gordon West technician book which i found at a hamfest for like two dollars, went through it pretty casually over maybe three weeks, then did practice tests on hamStudy for another week and passed first try. honestly the hardest part for me was the antenna and propagation questions, just because i had no frame of reference for any of it. but once you look up a few youtube videos explaining how radio waves actually work it clicks pretty fast. dont overthink it, the tech license is genuinely not that hard