so i decided i finally want to get my technician license after years of just being curious about ham radio. my neighbor has been into it forever and keeps telling me to just do it. anyway i bought one of those study guides off amazon, i think its the ARRL one, but honestly i kind of opened it and got a little overwhelmed. theres so much stuff in there and i dont even know if i need to read the whole thing or if i can just focus on certain sections.

someone told me the question pool is public and you can just memorize the answers which sounds almost too easy? but then i looked at it and some of the questions have answers that look really similar to each other and i cant always tell which one is right even after reading them a few times. especially the electrical stuff, ohms law and all that. is there a better way to study for this than just going through the book cover to cover? or do most people just use one of those online practice test sites

yeah the question pool thing is real, the exact questions and answers are all public so technically you could just memorize them but honestly i think understanding at least the basics helps a lot especially if you blank out during the test or they word something slightly different than you expected. what worked for me was doing the hamstudy.org practice tests over and over, like just hammering through them every day for a couple weeks. it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those. i barely touched the book honestly.

the ohms law stuff is actually not that bad once you just draw out the little triangle thing where you cover the variable you want and it shows you the formula. there's maybe 4 or 5 questions in the pool that are straight ohm's law calculations and once you get the hang of it they're free points. the regulations and operating procedure stuff is where i spent more time because theres more of it and some of it is weirdly specific about frequencies and privileges.

hamstudy.org just do that, seriously dont overthink it. i passed in like 3 weeks only studying maybe 20 minutes a night. the ARRL book is good if you actually want to understand the stuff but for just passing the exam its overkill imo