so ive had my technician license for about 8 months now and honestly ive been mostly just doing local stuff on 2m and some 70cm. but ive been listening to the HF bands on my buddys radio and it sounds amazing, like people talking all over the world and i want in on that. been reading about the General class exam and i guess my question is how different is it from the tech exam? i remember the tech exam being not too bad but i also remember some of the electrical theory questions being kinda rough and i barely passed. is the General exam a lot harder or is it about the same level? also what actually changes once you pass, like what bands do i get access to that i dont have now. sorry if this is a vague question im just not sure where to start

honestly it's not that bad if you already passed tech. the electrical theory stuff does go a bit deeper, like youll see more questions about things like impedance matching and propagation that the tech exam only kinda touches on. but the format is the same, 35 questions and you need 26 right i think. i used hamstudy.org every day for maybe 3 weeks and felt pretty comfortable going in. the HF privileges you get are really solid, you get chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, and 10m among others which is plenty to start with. 20 meters especially is great for general class ops because there's always someone on there. you wont have the full extra class allocations but you'll be able to do a ton of stuff. just start grinding the question pool and you'll be fine

yeah i upgraded from tech to general last spring and the thing that caught me off guard was the operating procedures and regulations section more than the theory honestly. like there's a fair amount of stuff about which frequencies are phone vs cw only, and the band plans matter on the exam. i kept mixing up the sub-bands for a while. but once it clicks it makes sense. also just fyi once you get general you can actually get on 40 meters at night and it's kind of wild, you can work stations really far away just with like 50-100 watts and a decent antenna. totally worth doing the upgrade, i wish i hadnt waited as long as i did