ok so i decided i want to get my technician license and i downloaded the question pool from the arrl website but honestly its kind of overwhelming. theres like 400 something questions and i dont really know if i should just memorize all of them or actually try to understand the material. my brother in law got his license years ago and he said just memorize the answers but that feels wrong somehow, like what if i actually need to know this stuff later

also is the hamstudy.org thing actually good? someone at the radio club meetup mentioned it but i wasnt sure if it was outdated or whatever. im taking the exam in about 6 weeks so i dont feel super rushed but also dont want to fail and look dumb in front of the club guys lol

any advice on what to focus on would be great, the electrical math stuff especially is kind of freaking me out

hamstudy.org is honestly the best thing out there for this right now, just use that. the spaced repetition thing it does actually works and itll tell you when youre ready to test. six weeks is plenty of time, i studied for maybe two and a half weeks and passed with room to spare.

for the math stuff - ohms law is really the main thing you need, and even then the questions are pretty forgiving. theres only a handful of actual calculation questions and once you see the pattern like two or three times it clicks. dont stress it.

your brother in law isnt totally wrong either, the pool is public so you will literally see those exact questions on your exam. but i get what you mean about wanting to understand it, especially if youre planning to actually operate and maybe upgrade to general later. understanding why a dipole is a half wavelength makes it stick a lot better than just memorizing letter D or whatever

so anyway i went through three different study guides before my tech exam and honestly the gordon west book was the one that finally made things click for me but that was a few years back so i dont know if the question pool has changed since then - i think they update it every four years or something like that so worth checking if the edition is current before you buy anything.

the electrical stuff isnt as bad as it looks. the formulas they test you on are pretty much just ohm's law and a little bit of power calculation. if you can remember P equals I times E and juggle that around youre probably fine for most of it. the rest of the exam is more like rules and regulations and band plans which is really just reading and common sense after a while.

also dont skip the RF safety questions, theres a chunk of those now and people sometimes underestimate how many show up on the actual test