so ive been a General for about two years now and I keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Amateur Extra. I mostly do HF, some SSB on 40 and 20, little bit of digital. I dont really have a specific reason I need the extra privileges right now, the General bands are honestly fine for what I do. But it kind of bugs me that there are portions of the bands I cant touch.

my main hesitation is the theory. I remember reading somewhere that the Extra exam gets into like transmission line theory, filter design, that kind of stuff. I passed my General without too much trouble but I never went to school for electronics or anything, just kind of self taught from handbooks and youtube. is the theory on the Extra actually difficult if you dont have an engineering background, or is it the kind of thing where if you just grind through the question pool it mostly makes sense? I dont want to spend months studying and then feel like I still dont understand what any of it means.

honestly the Extra pool is not as bad as people make it out to be. yeah there's some stuff about reactance and impedance matching and a few questions about filter topologies that look intimidating at first but if you go through the ARRL Extra Class License Manual it walks you through the theory in a way that actually makes sense even without a formal background. took me maybe six weeks of casual studying, maybe an hour a night. the question pool is finite and a lot of it starts clicking once you see the same concepts come up in different questions. the HF privileges are worth it alone, getting into the CW portions and the phone subbands that are Extra only opens up a lot especially when the bands get crowded.

im in the same boat you are basically, just passed mine last month. the hardest part for me was the stuff around op-amps and the oscillator questions, felt like i was just memorizing without really getting it. but you know what i passed anyway and honestly some of it did start to make more sense after i went back and read about it after the fact. dont overthink it, just use hamexam or qrz practice tests and youll be fine. the actual exam felt easier than the practice ones somehow.