so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i want to get on HF already. been watching people work DX on 20m at my local club and its making me jealous lol. anyway i looked at the question pool and it seems like a lot of it is electrical theory and regulations stuff which i was never great at in school. like the math parts especially. i get the basic ohms law stuff but some of the formulas are throwing me off.

has anyone done the upgrade recently? is it something you can realistically study for in like a month if you put in a few hours a week? or is it one of those things where you really need a background in electronics to not drown. any study resources you guys actually found helpful would be appreciated, not looking for something thats gonna cost a lot

honestly its not that bad. i was in the same boat, tech for like 2 years before i finally sat down and just did it. used hamstudy.org basically every day for about 3 weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes at a time on lunch breaks or whatever, and passed with a comfortable margin. the math looks scarier than it is because you dont really have to derive anything, most of it you can learn the pattern for and recognize the answer format. the hardest part for me was the propagation stuff and remembering which bands you get privileges on vs which ones are still restricted as general. there are some edge cases there that trip people up.

biggest thing i'd say is dont just memorize answers blindly, like actually try to understand why the answer is what it is for at least some of the questions, it makes it stick way better and honestly makes you a better operator anyway. good luck man, 20m is absolutely worth it

did mine about two months ago, took maybe 5 weeks of casual studying. gordon west book is what i used, its like 20 bucks on amazon. some people swear by just doing the question pool over and over which probably works too but i liked having some context for the stuff. the electrical theory section really isnt that deep, its mostly just plugging numbers into formulas and the answer choices are usually spread far enough apart that ballpark math gets you there.

one thing nobody told me beforehand is that you can actually take the Extra exam the same day if you want to try, costs nothing extra usually since the VEs are already there. i wasnt ready for extra but a guy at my session tried it and got it. just something to keep in mind if you end up burning through the material faster than expected