so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it looks really cool. i finally decided to just go for it and get licensed but honestly i dont even know where to begin. ive seen people mention hamstudy and arrl but i dont know which one is better or if i need to buy a book or what. also how hard is the test actually? im not super technical, i took one electronics class like 10 years ago but i dont remember much. any advice would be helpful, i just dont want to show up to the test and embarrass myself

honestly hamstudy.org is all you really need, just drill the question pool until you're getting 85 or higher consistently on the practice tests and you'll be fine. the actual question pool is public so everything on the test comes straight from it, no surprises. i studied for maybe two weeks doing like 20-30 minutes a night and passed no problem. the electronics stuff is a lot of memorizing more than actual understanding, at least for tech. you'll figure out what ohms law is eventually but for now just learn the answer lol

find a local club test session on the arrl website, they're usually like 15 bucks and pretty low key. the voluneteer examiners are generally pretty friendly, nobody is trying to fail you

yeah what the other person said about hamstudy is solid advice. i'll add that if you're the kind of person who wants to actually understand the material rather than just memorize it, the arrl ham radio license manual is decent. bit dry but it explains the why behind stuff which helped me remember things better than just flashcards. took me about three weeks studying pretty casually.

one thing i'd say is dont stress about the RF safety questions, everyone freaks out about those but if you just read through the explanations a couple times they start to make sense. and bring two forms of ID to the test session, i forgot that almost happened to me and it woud have been a whole thing