so ive been a General for about 3 years now and i keep telling myself im gonna go for the Extra but every time i look at the practice exams i get bogged down in the filter stuff and the math-heavy questions and just kind of give up and close the tab. the operating privileges honestly arent that big a deal for me since i mostly do 40m and 20m anyway and generals can work those bands fine but theres something about just having the full ticket that appeals to me i guess.

anyway i started going through the question pool more seriously this week and some of the stuff about LC circuits and reactance i sort of remember from when i was studying for General but now its like way more in depth. and then theres all the stuff about amplifier classes and transmission line theory that i genuinely have no idea where to even start. is there a good way to approach this stuff or do most people just brute force memorize the pool? i feel like id rather actually understand it but maybe thats not realistic with how big the pool is

honestly for most of the hard theory stuff i used the ARRL Extra Class License Manual and it actually explains the why behind a lot of those questions which made it stick way better than just memorizing answers. the transmission line section was rough for me too but once i understood what SWR was actually doing physically it clicked. that said i also just drilled the question pool on HamStudy for the last two weeks before my exam and i think that helped fill in whatever gaps were left. you dont have to choose one or the other.

the amplifier class stuff like Class A B C AB whatever, once someone explained the conduction angle thing to me it made way more sense. basically just think about how much of the input waveform the transistor is actually conducting on. theres a youtube video by some guy, cant remember his callsign, that does a good visual breakdown of it.

i just took mine in march and passed first try, the math questions look scarier than they are tbh. like for the reactance stuff you really only need like three or four formulas and they give you enough context in the question to figure out which one. i was way more worried going in than i needed to be. just do a ton of practice tests and when you get something wrong look up why, dont just move on.