so ive been wanting to get my technician license for like two years now and i finally decided to just do it. problem is i dont really know where to start with studying. i looked at the ARRL book and it seems like a lot but i also heard some people just use the question pool directly and memorize answers? is that actually a thing people do or is it cheating yourself out of understanding the material

also the question pool on the FCC site looks kind of intimidating, theres a lot of questions about like ohms law and stuff i havent thought about since high school. do i need to actually understand all the math or can i just learn the formulas and plug numbers in when i see them on the test

any advice appreciated, i feel like im overthonking this

honestly the hamstudyorg website is what most people use now, you just go through the question pool and it tracks what you get wrong and keeps drilling you on those. a lot of people pass the exam without reading a single page of the ARRL book and theres nothing wrong with that, you learn way more actually being on the air anyway

the math on the tech exam is pretty basic, like you really just need to remember E=IR and a couple power formulas and the questions are written in a way where you can almost figure it out from the answers if you see the pattern enough times. dont stress it. most people who put in a couple weeks on hamstudy pass first try, the pool isnt that big

I was in the same boat maybe 8 months ago. I used hamstudy AND the ARRL technician book together and I think that combo helped because the book explained the why behind stuff, like why certain frequencies behave the way they do, which made the questions stick better instead of just memorizing. took me about 3 weeks studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night

the ohms law stuff really isnt bad once you do a few practice problems, the exam questions basically give you two of the three values and ask for the third so if you can rearrange a simple equation youre fine. what helped me was just doing the hamstudy practice exams over and over until i was consistently hitting like 85 percent or better, then i went and took the real thing and passed with room to spare