so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly ive been having a blast on 2m and doing some APRS stuff but everyone keeps telling me to get my General already so i can get on HF. i downloaded the question pool and just kind of stared at it for a while lol. theres a lot in there about propagation and operating procedures and some of the electrical theory stuff is a bit intimidating honestly.

my main question i guess is like, how long did it take you to actually feel ready to sit for the exam. i dont have a great background in electronics or anything, just kind of a computer guy. should i just memorize the pool or actually try to understand the material. and also what parts of the test tripped you up the most because some of the band plan questions seem weirdly specific

honestly the General exam isnt that bad once you just commit to grinding through the question pool. i used HamStudy dot org basically every day for like 3 weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes on my lunch break, and passed with room to spare. the electrical theory stuff looks scary but a lot of it is the same formulas just asked different ways so once you get ohms law and the power formula down you can kinda work through most of those on the fly.

the band plan and operating privilege questions are actually pretty straightforward once you look at an actual band chart and see how the General portions are laid out. 40 meters was where i started making contacts almost immediately after upgrading, especially in the evenings. the bands were doing weird stuff last fall but 40 was almost always there for something. just go take the test, worst case you dont pass and you learn what to study harder

I took mine like two months after getting my Tech. Passed but barely, missed some of the electrical stuff on impedance matching which i thought i understood but apparently not lol. the propagation questions were actually kind of interesting to me once i started listening on HF even before i had my ticket upgraded, just tuning around on a friends radio and hearing how different 20m sounded at different times of day made all the skip and ionosphere stuff click way faster than just reading about it.