so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and we got talking and he said i should just go get my ticket. i looked online and theres like three different license levels and i honestly have no idea which one to go for first or what the difference is between them. do i have to learn morse code? i heard something about that. also is the test hard, im not great at memorizing stuff and some of the practice questions i found looked pretty technical. just looking for some kind of starting point i guess, any advice would be appreciated

okay so first thing, no morse code requirement anymore, that went away years ago so dont worry about that. for most people the Technician license is where you start, its the entry level one and once you pass that youre good to transmit on VHF and UHF which is plenty to get going. the question pool is like 425 questions and the actual exam pulls 35 from that, you need 26 right to pass. honestly if you use hamstudy.org and just drill questions for a week or two most people can pass without too much trouble. some folks also use the Gordon West book or the ARRL study guide, i used the ARRL one back when i got mine and it was fine but hamstudy alone is probably enough for a lot of people. the main thing is just dont overthink it, the questions repeat a lot and once you see the pool enough times it starts to click. find a local club too, they usually run exam sessions and sometimes have free study nights which helps a ton if youre the kind of person who does better not just reading alone

i literally just did this like two months ago so maybe i can help a bit. i was in the same spot as you had no idea where to start. i ended up just using hamstudy.org on my phone during lunch breaks at work and honestly passed the tech exam after maybe three weeks of that. the questions arent as scary as they look at first, a lot of them you can figure out with common sense even if you dont fully understand the theory behind it. the one thing that tripped me up a bit was some of the electrical formulas like ohms law stuff but there are only a few of those and you can just memorize the approach. my test was at a local club and the VEs were super nice, way less stressful than i expected. definitely just go for it