so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like im hitting a wall with just 2m and 70cm. i hear people talking on HF and it sounds so much more interesting, like actual conversations instead of just repeating my callsign into a repeater and waiting for someone to acknowledge me lol

anyway i downloaded the question pool from the arrl site and started going through it and some of it is way over my head. like the electrical stuff, ohms law i can kinda follow but then it gets into reactance and impedance and i lose track pretty fast. is the actual exam that brutal or does the question pool make it seem worse than it is? i feel like half the questions are things ill never actually use

also not sure how long i should study before trying to take it. took me about 3 weeks to pass my tech exam if that helps anyone gauge where im at

honestly the general isnt that bad, just takes a bit more time than tech. the electrical theory stuff does look scary on paper but the way the exam works you really just need to recognize the right answer, not derive it from scratch. i used hamstudy.org and just drilled questions every day for maybe 20-30 minutes for about a month and passed no problem

the stuff about HF propagation and the band privileges is pretty interesting once you get into it, like it actually starts making sense why certain bands work better at different times of day. that part almost felt less like studying and more like just reading about something cool. the impedance and reactance stuff i just kinda memorized the formulas and moved on, didnt stress about fully understanding it

if you passed tech in 3 weeks you can probably do general in 4 or 5, maybe less if you put in the time. just dont overthink it

the exam itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass, so you have some room to miss things. i remember blanking on a couple of the more obscure regs questions and still passed fine. the electrical theory section is probably the part where most people struggle but there are really only a handful of formulas that come up and they tend to repeat in different forms so you'll start recognizing them

one thing i'd say is dont skip the operating procedures and regulations sections even if they seem boring, those are usually pretty easy points and you dont want to lose them because you only studied the technical stuff. took me maybe 5 weeks of casual studying and i went in feeling pretty confident. once you get your general the HF bands open up and its a whole different world, 40 meters at night especially can be wild