okay so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it always looked cool to me. he told me i need a license before i can transmit anything which makes sense i guess. but im kind of lost on where to actually start. like do i just show up somewhere and take a test or is there classes or something? and how hard is the technician test really, im not great at math or electronics but i can study if i know what im supposed to study. also is there more than one level of license? sorry if these are dumb questions

not dumb questions at all, everyone starts somewhere. so yeah there are three license classes - technician, general, and amateur extra - and you work up from tech which is the entry level one. the technician exam is honestly not that bad, its 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass. the best part is the question pool is completely public so you literally already know every question that could show up on the test before you walk in.

for studying most people just use hamstudy.org and drill questions on there until they're passing consistently. there's also the ARRL technician manual if you want to actually understand the material rather than just memorize answers, but plenty of people pass just doing the flash card grind on hamstudy. the math is really minimal, like you might get a question about ohms law and thats basically as scary as it gets for tech.

to find a test session near you go to arrl.org and look up exam sessions, they're usually run by volunteer examiner clubs and cost around 15 bucks. your neighbor might even know of a local club that hosts them regularly. good luck

i just passed my tech about 3 months ago so this is fresh for me. honestly i was nervous going in but the hamstudy app thing the other guy mentioned is what got me through it, i did like 2 weeks of studying maybe 20-30 mins a day and passed with room to spare. the math questions tripped me up at first but once you see the same formulas a few times it clicks. dont stress too much about fully understanding everything right away, you learn way more once you're actually on the air