so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has like three antennas in his yard and it always looked interesting. i finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam but honestly i dont even know where to start. there's so much stuff online and some of it looks really outdated? i found one site with questions but it said 2018 on it somewhere so i dont know if those are still valid.

also does anyone actually memorize all the answers or do you study the concepts behind them. feels like there's a lot of electrical theory stuff i'm never gonna fully understand. been out of school for like 20 years so the math isnt exactly fresh in my mind. is there a good guide someone recommends or maybe an app or something

the question pool gets updated every four years so you want to make sure you're looking at the current one, i think we're still on the 2022-2026 pool right now. HamStudy.org is honestly the best free resource ive used, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those specifically. there's also a mobile app version which is handy for studying on lunch breaks or whatever.

as for whether to memorize vs understand -- honestly a little of both. some of the electrical theory stuff like ohms law you really should understand because it shows up in a few different questions phrased different ways. but some of the regulatory stuff like band privileges and part 97 rules, a lot of people just straight up memorize those. nobody expects you to derive why the tech HF privileges are what they are, you just need to know them for the test. give yourself two or three weeks of maybe 20 minutes a day on hamstudy and you'll be surprised how fast it clicks.

i passed mine back in march and literally just used the hamstudy app for like two weeks. dont overthink it. the math questions look scary but there really arent that many and once you see the same ones a few times you just remember the answer. i was also worried about the electrical theory stuff but honestly most of it is pretty surface level for the tech exam, not like you need to design a circuit or anything.