so ive had my technician for about two years now and mostly been doing local stuff, some 2m simplex, a little APRS. but ive been hearing about HF and people talking about working stations in europe and stuff and im starting to feel like im missing out on a whole other world of the hobby

anyway i downloaded the question pool and its honestly kind of overwhelming. theres stuff in there about propagation and feed line losses and like... G factors for antennas? i barely understood some of the tech license questions when i took that. is this actually something i can get ready for in like a few weeks or am i looking at a longer study period. and is HF actually worth all the trouble because i dont even have an HF rig yet so itd be an investment

also does anyone know if the question pool changed recently because i saw something about that and dont want to study the wrong version

the general exam isnt nearly as bad as it looks when you first open the pool, honestly. when i upgraded a few years back i used hamstudy.org and just drilled flashcards for maybe three weeks, like 20-30 minutes a night. the site tracks which questions you keep missing and focuses you on those. by the time i sat for the exam i was consistently hitting 85-90% on the practice tests and the real thing felt pretty straightforward.

the propagation stuff does look scary at first but once you actually get on HF and start hearing the bands open and close it all starts clicking in a way that reading never quite gets across. like yeah you can memorize that 10 meters is good during high solar flux but once you hear it yourself its just different. the math questions you can mostly brute force from the pool since the answers are right there, doesnt hurt to understand why but you dont have to going in.

as for whether its worth it, i mean that depends on what you want out of the hobby but for me getting on 40 meters for the first time and having a guy in germany actually come back to my call was kind of a moment. its a different scale than local stuff for sure

i just did this like four months ago so pretty fresh for me. took me honestly closer to five or six weeks but im slow lol. the question pool changed in 2023 i think? make sure you're using the current one, hamstudy shows you which version it's pulling from so just double check that. some of the older pdf versions floating around online are out of date

the feedline and antenna stuff was where i struggled too but theres a couple youtube guys that explain the decibel math in a way that actually makes sense, just search general class study and youll find them. once i got the math part it wasnt that bad. good luck, its worth it