so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and my neighbor who's been licensed for like 20 years told me to just go for it and take the technician exam. i downloaded some stuff but honestly there's so much out there i dont even know what to look at first. like there's the ARRL book, there's HamStudy, there's some app someone mentioned on reddit, and then someone else said to just memorize the question pool which sounds kind of terrifying because there's what, 400 something questions?

i work full time so i cant study for hours every day. is there a realistic way to pass this without spending months on it? and does it actually matter if you understand the stuff or can you just pattern match your way through it? asking for real because im not an electronics guy at all, i barely passed high school physics

honestly the question pool isn't as bad as it sounds when you actually sit down with it. there's 426 questions total but only 35 show up on the actual exam and they're pulled from specific sections so if you focus on the ones you're weak on it goes faster. HamStudy dot org is what i usually point people to, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills those specifically. most people i know who used it consistently for like 2-3 weeks passed fine, no electronics background needed.

the ARRL book is good if you actually want to understand the why behind things but if you just want to pass and figure the rest out on the air, the question pool method works. i wont lie to you. lot of new hams do exactly that. the understanding comes later when you're actually playing with the radio and running into stuff.

i did mine about 8 months ago and was in the same spot, zero background. i used the HamStudy app on my phone mostly during lunch breaks and just kind of did 20-30 questions a day. took me maybe 3 weeks. the electrical stuff like ohms law and the basic circuit questions look scary but theres really only a handful of formulas that actually show up and you can just memorize which numbers go where honestly. passed with a 32 out of 35 and i still dont fully understand what a dipole is lol, learning that now