so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and mostly been doing 2m and some 70cm stuff, got my HT and a cheap mobile rig. but honestly i keep hearing people on the local repeater talking about working dx and contacts all over the place on HF and im starting to feel like im missing out on a lot.

been looking at the general class exam and it seems like a lot of the questions are pretty different from the tech exam, like theres actual math involved with like impedance and stuff? im not great at math, got through it in high school but that was a while ago. is it realistic to just use the hamstudy.org thing and grind through the pool or do i actually need to understand all the theory to pass.

also what HF privileges do i actually get as a general, someone mentioned i still cant use certain parts of 20m or something like that? just trying to figure out if its worth the effort before i commit to studying

the math on the general exam is honestly not that bad, i was dreading it too but most of it you can just memorize the formulas and plug in numbers. like ohms law stuff and a few resonance calculations. hamstudy is genuinely all you need if you go through it enough times, i think i spent maybe 3 weeks on it doing like 20-30 minutes a day on my lunch break and passed no problem.

on the privileges thing yeah you dont get the full band, on 20m for example generals get most of it but the extra class guys have a chunk of the lower part of the phone portion. honestly as a new HF op you probably wont even notice for a while, theres plenty of room. 40m and 15m are great bands to start on and you get good chunks of both. just go take the exam, worst case you fail and you can retake it same day at a lot of sessions anyway

i upgraded last year after being a tech for like 2 years and honestly wish i had done it sooner. the exam felt harder going in but once i actually started studying i realized a lot of it overlaps with tech stuff just goes a bit deeper. the band plan questions tripped me up at first because theres just a lot to memorize but hamstudy drills it into you pretty fast.

one thing nobody told me before i upgraded was that even after i passed i had to wait for the FCC to update my license in the ULS before i could actually operate HF legally, took like 3 days. so just be aware of that so you dont go home and immediately jump on 40m thinking youre good to go lol