so i passed my technician about 8 months ago and ive been mostly doing 2m and some 70cm stuff on my local repeaters which has been fun but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and i want in on that. been reading a bit about the general class upgrade and i guess my question is how much harder is it than technician? like is it a totally different level of studying or is it more of the same kind of thing just more of it?

also i dont really understand what privileges i actually get on HF once i pass. i know i wont have full access like an extra class but people keep saying general is enough to do most things you'd actually want to do. is that true? i have a baofeng and a cheap sdr dongle right now, no HF rig yet so i guess i need to figure out equipment too but one thing at a time

general is definitely a step up from tech but honestly not as scary as people make it out to be. the pool is bigger and theres more about HF propagation, antenna theory, some electrical stuff that gets into ohms law and basic circuit stuff. if you did fine on the tech exam you should be okay with a couple weeks of solid study using the hamstudy website or the gordon west book. i used hamstudy and just drilled questions every day for like 3 weeks and passed with a decent score.

as for privileges, yeah general gets you into most of the good stuff. you get access to big chunks of 40m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 10m and others. 20m is kind of the workhorse band for DX, you can work stations all over the world when conditions are decent. the only real limitation compared to extra is you dont have access to the extra class portions of some bands which tend to be a bit less crowded, but honestly on general you can still do plenty of dx chasing and contesting. id say get the license first then worry about the rig, but start looking at used radios in the meantime, icom 7300 comes up a lot as a first HF radio and its pretty well regarded

i just upgraded to general like two months ago so pretty fresh on this lol. the propagation section tripped me up a bit, like the stuff about ionospheric layers and what affects what band at what time of day. i kind of memorized the questions without fully getting it at first and then it started making more sense once i actually started listening on HF. just get on websdr or something and start poking around the bands before you even have a license, really helps it click

oh and the math isnt as bad as i feared, its mostly just knowing the formulas and plugging in numbers, nothing crazy