so ive been a general for about 3 years now and honestly the extra class has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. i mostly do HF, some 40m and 20m SSB, occasional digital. a buddy of mine at the club keeps telling me to just go for it but then he also said the theory sections are pretty brutal if you havent touched math since high school which... yeah thats me.

im not really worried about the operating stuff or the regs, thats mostly just memorization and i did fine on the general. its more the stuff like network theory and filter design and whatever else they throw at you. like do you actually need to understand it or can you just brute force the question pool. and is there any point to having the extra besides the HF privileges below 14.150 and the vanity call thing. genuinely asking because im not sure how much actual on-air difference it makes day to day

honestly the extra pool isnt as terrible as people make it out to be. yeah theres some LC circuit stuff and a bit on impedance matching and the odd question about transistor biasing but its not like youre sitting an EE exam. i used the hamstudy.org flashcards for maybe 6 weeks on and off and passed first try. the way that site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong is really useful.

as for whether its worth it practically, the extra sub-bands do get less crowded especially during contests which is kind of nice. and yeah the vanity call stuff if thats your thing. but honestly i think most people just do it for the sense of finishing what you started, its the top of the ladder and thats reason enough imo

i just passed mine last month so this is pretty fresh. the theory questions tripped me up at first but once you realize a lot of it is the same like 4 or 5 concepts just asked different ways it clicks. ohms law and resonance and Q factor show up everywhere in different forms. i did not understand filter design at all going in and i still dont really but i got enough of the questions right lol. Gordon West's book helped me more than i expected, he breaks things down pretty simply without assuming you have an engineering background