so ive been a general for about 2 years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. i know a lot of people just grind the question pool and pass it that way but honestly some of the stuff in there looks actually interesting? like the impedance matching stuff and the filter theory and whatever.

my question is i guess... is it worth actually trying to understand the advanced theory or do most people just memorize and move on. i feel like if i dont understand it ill just forget it all the week after the test anyway. but the pool is also like 700+ questions so thats a lot of memorizing too. also does getting the extra actually change what you do day to day on the air or is it mostly just for the sub-bands

honestly both approaches work and neither one is wrong. i did a mix when i took mine a few years back, there were some sections where i actually sat down with the ARRL handbook and tried to work through the theory properly like the filter stuff and the transmission line sections because i was genuinely curious, and then for other parts like the regulatory questions i just straight up memorized because there's no deeper truth to learn there, its just rules.

the subbands thing is real though, having 40m extra sub-band access alone was worth it to me because thats where a lot of the dx action is during contests. and the 80m and 160m windows matter too if you do any serious cw. day to day casual ragchewing probably not a huge difference but if you ever start doing dx or contesting you'll feel it pretty quickly. the theory stuff does stick better if you learn it properly, i still remember most of the reactance and Q factor concepts because i actually worked through them instead of just pattern matching the answers

i just passed mine like three months ago. went full memorization route using hamstudy.org and it took me maybe 6 weeks of spare time studying. passed with an 88 i think. do i understand all of it? nope, not even close. the op-amp questions and some of the oscillator stability stuff i still couldnt explain to anyone. but the sub bands were immediately useful and i feel like the license means something even if i cheated my way through the theory lol. probably gonna go back and actually read about some of it eventually