so ive been a tech for about 2 years now mostly just doing 2m and some aprs stuff and i finally decided to buckle down and go for general. been using hamstudy.org which is great but some of the questions are tripping me up, mainly the propagation stuff and the phone privileges sections. like i understand the basic concept that HF goes further but the questions about which bands i can actually use as a general vs extra are kind of confusing because the charts in the study material all look the same to me at a glance.

also the electrical stuff, like the questions about reactance and impedance, i passed trig in high school but that was 15 years ago lol. do i actually need to understand that stuff deeply or is it mostly just memorizing which answer to pick? i feel bad saying that but im being honest. the test is in 3 weeks and im probably at like 70% on the practice tests right now.

anyone gone through this recently and have advice on what to actually focus on?

the band privileges thing clicked for me when i just printed out the actual FCC band chart, the one with the colored sections, and taped it to my wall for a few weeks. general gets a pretty solid chunk of 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters for phone which is honestly where most of the action is anyway. the extra portions you cant use yet are usually just the lower edges of the band, so in practice youll have plenty of room to operate and figure out whats going on.

for the impedance and reactance questions i wouldnt stress too much about deriving anything from scratch. if you understand that capacitors and inductors react oppositely to frequency changes and you can remember a couple of the formulas just well enough to recognize the right answer, thats usually sufficient. the general exam isnt trying to make you an RF engineer. i think i was around 72% on practice tests a week before mine and ended up passing fine, just keep hammering the ones you get wrong and read the explanation for each one even if you got it right.

went through this like 8 months ago, same boat as you coming from tech. honestly the propagation questions were the ones i was most worried about and they ended up being fine on the actual test, a lot of it is just pattern recognition after you do enough practice rounds. the thing that actually got me was some of the operating procedures questions, like the specific stuff about what you have to say when you sign with a club callsign or whatever, i kind of glossed over that section and got bit.

3 weeks is plenty of time if youre already at 70, just dont stop doing practice tests every day