so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local repeater stuff and some simplex. honestly its been fun but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and i kind of want to get into that. problem is i look at the general class pool and some of it looks pretty intimidating, like the electrical theory stuff and the operating procedures for HF bands.

my question is how much time did you guys spend studying before you felt ready to take the general exam and is there like a specific resource that actually helped. ive been looking at hamstudy.org and it seems decent but i dont know if thats enough or if i need to actually buy a book. also is the 40m and 20m stuff pretty accessible once you get the ticket or do you need like a big fancy antenna setup to actually make contacts

hamstudy.org is honestly probably enough if you do it consistently, thats basically how i passed mine. just keep grinding the practice tests until you're consistently getting like 85% or better and you should be fine on the real thing. the electrical theory looks scarier than it is, a lot of it is just memorizing the formulas and when to apply them, you dont need to deeply understand why ohms law works the way it does just know how to use it on a multiple choice test lol

the HF stuff once you have the ticket is way more accessible than you'd think. i started out with a used IC-7300 and a random wire antenna strung up between two trees and made contacts into europe on 40m within the first week. propagation does a lot of the heavy lifting honestly. 20m is great during the day, 40m opens up really well at night. dont let anyone tell you that you need a tower and a beam to get started, a simple dipole or even a long wire will get you on the air and making real contacts

i just took mine like two months ago so still pretty fresh in my memory. the exam wasnt as bad as i built it up to be in my head. i used the gordon west book plus hamstudy and that combo worked really well for me, the book explains the why behind things which i found helped stuff stick better than just flash cards alone

the part that actually tripped me up was some of the band plan stuff and knowing which portions of each band techs vs generals vs extras can use, so maybe pay extra attention to that because there were more questions on it than i expected. good luck with it