so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing VHF/UHF stuff on my baofeng and a couple local repeaters. its been fun but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and working other countries and stuff and now im kind of obsessed with the idea of actually doing that.

my question is basically how hard is the General exam compared to Tech? i remember the Tech exam felt pretty manageable, i studied with HamStudy for like 2 weeks and passed no problem. but i've heard the General has a lot more math and electrical theory and honestly math is not really my strong suit. is there stuff about like resistors and ohms law and whatever that i need to actually understand or can i just memorize the answers from the question pool? and also what HF privileges do i actually get on General vs having to wait for Extra? im trying to figure out if General is enough to actually do the DX stuff people talk about or if i need to go all the way to Extra right away

honestly the General exam isnt that bad, dont psych yourself out. yeah there's some electrical theory but its not like you need to derive anything from scratch, the question pool is fixed so HamStudy works great for it same as Tech. i'd say give yourself maybe 3-4 weeks if math makes you nervous but plenty of people knock it out in 2. the ohms law stuff that shows up is pretty basic, like P=IE type stuff, if you can do simple multiplication and division youre fine.

as for HF privileges, General gets you a ton. you get big chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and more, honestly most of the good DX action happens on 20m and you have full access to most of it as a General. Extra opens up a few more slices at the edges of the bands where there's sometimes less QRM but its not like youre locked out of DX as a General. i worked like 60 countries in my first year as a General before i even thought about upgrading. just go do it, the exam is the easy part lol

I was in the same boat like a year ago. upgraded to General last spring and yeah the test felt a little harder than Tech but not crazy. the parts that tripped me up were more like the propagation stuff and some of the operating procedures, not so much the math. there is some math but if you just work through the practice tests enough times the formulas kind of stick even if you dont fully understand them.

one thing i'll say is get yourself at least a halfway decent HF rig before you pass the exam so youre not just sitting there with a new license and nothing to use it on, i made that mistake and waited like 2 months to actually get on the air and it felt like forever. i ended up going with a used icom 718 which was maybe not the most exciting choice but it works and i've made contacts all over with it