so my brother in law has been into ham radio for years and finally convinced me to get my technician license. i downloaded some app and i guess theres an actual question pool you study from? like the real exam questions are in there somewhere? im a little confused because some of the questions seem totally random, like one second its asking about electrical safety and then the next its about like ionospheric propagation or whatever that means. do i need to actually understand all this stuff or is it more just memorize the answers and move on. i dont have a ton of time, maybe like 30-45 minutes a day to study. is that enough or am i kidding myself

yeah the question pool thing is real, the FCC basically publishes all the possible questions ahead of time so theres no secret surprises on the exam. HamStudy.org is honestly where id point you first, its free and it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong so it focuses on those. the spaced repetition thing actually works pretty well. 30-45 minutes a day is plenty, most people pass in a few weeks doing less than that honestly. some of the stuff like ohms law you actually want to understand because it helps the answers make sense but a lot of the band plan stuff is just pattern recognition after a while. dont stress too much about propagation for the tech exam, theres not that much of it and its pretty surface level

i passed mine like 6 months ago and was in the exact same boat. i used the Gordon West study book which my club had a copy of and that helped me because i like reading but honestly i probably only needed the app. one thing i'll say is dont skip the electrical safety questions even if they seem obvious, theres a few trick ones about RF exposure that tripped me up in practice. the actual exam felt easier than the practice tests which was a nice surprise