so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is really into it and he finally convinced me to just go ahead and get the license. i signed up for an exam session thats about 6 weeks away and now im kind of panicking because i dont really know how to study for this thing.

i downloaded the question pool PDF from the ARRL website but its like 400+ questions and honestly it feels overwhelming. do people actually memorize all of them or is there a smarter way to do it? i've seen some apps mentioned on reddit but idk which ones are actually worth using vs just wasting time. also some of the electrical stuff like ohms law and the decibel questions are tripping me up, im not super technical. is that stuff going to be a big chunk of the actual exam or can i kind of get by without fully understanding it

ham study dot com is what most people point newcomers to these days, its free and it drills you on the actual question pool with the same wording youll see on the test. the tech exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass, so theres actually a decent amount of wiggle room. the math questions on the real exam are pretty limited, usually just a handful, and if you learn the basic ohms law triangle and remember that every 3dB is roughly doubling or halving power youll be fine for most of it. six weeks is plenty of time honestly. i'd say just do like 50-100 practice questions a day on that site and by week 3 or 4 youll start seeing your scores climb and itll feel way less scary. dont stress too much about understanding every single concept deeply, for the tech exam pattern recognition on the question pool gets most people through it just fine.

yeah i passed mine a few months ago using basically just hamstudy and the gordon west technician book, the book is kind of old school but it actually explains the why behind stuff which helped me retain it better than just drilling questions. the electrical math freaked me out too but theres really only like 3 or 4 formulas you need and they show up pretty predictably. one thing that helped me was just doing a full 35 question practice test every night in the last two weeks before my exam so i got used to the pacing. good luck, its really not as bad as it looks at first