so i passed my technician about 8 months ago and ive been poking around on 2m and 70cm mostly just doing local stuff with the club. but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and i feel like im missing out on a whole other world. been thinking about going for general but im not really sure what to expect study-wise.

the tech exam wasnt too bad for me, took maybe 3 weeks of going through the question pool on hamstudy and i felt pretty comfortable going in. is general more of the same or is there actually harder stuff in there? i remember seeing something about propagation and the different bands being a bigger deal on general. also the regulations stuff looked more complicated when i glanced at it. anybody upgrade recently and have thoughts on what tripped them up or what to focus on

honestly its not that scary, i upgraded last spring after putting it off forever and kicked myself for waiting so long. the question pool is bigger but a lot of it builds on what you already know from tech. propagation stuff like understanding skywave and how the bands behave at different times of day, that trips some people up at first but once it clicks it makes sense. the electrical stuff gets a little more math-heavy, like calculating impedance and figuring out power levels, nothing crazy but you actually have to think about it a little unlike some of the tech questions where you could kind of just memorize.

i used hamstudy same as you and also grabbed the ARRL general handbook from the library just to read through the relevant chapters, not to memorize but just to actually understand why the answers are what they are. took me about 5 or 6 weeks studying maybe 20-30 mins a day. passed with an 87 i think. the HF privileges are absolutely worth it, first night i had my upgrade in the system i made contacts into europe on 20m with my crappy dipole hanging from a tree

i just did mine like two months ago so this is fresh lol. the operating procedures section threw me off a little, like knowing when to use certain modes and the band privileges for different license classes, theres a lot of specific numbers to keep straight. also the part about antenna theory i had to go over a few times. but yeah hamstudy will get you through it, i just kept drilling the questions i was getting wrong until they stuck. dont sleep on the part about electrical safety either, theres more of it than you'd expect