so i decided i want to get my technician license and i bought a study guide at a hamfest a couple weeks ago but honestly its kind of overwhelming. theres so much stuff in the question pool about electrical theory and i dont really have a background in any of that. like i understand the basic radio stuff conceptually but when it gets into ohms law and calculating things i kind of zone out.

is there a better way to go about this or do i just need to grind through all 400+ questions until i know them. a guy at the hamfest told me to just memorize the answers without understanding them but that feels wrong somehow. also how long did it take most people to actually feel ready to take the test

honestly the memorize-the-answers approach works fine for passing the test, plenty of people do it that way, but you'll kick yourself later when youre on the air and have no idea why something works the way it does. what helped me was using hamstudy.org — its free and it tracks which questions youre getting wrong so you can focus on those instead of grinding everything equally. took me about 3 weeks studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night before i felt solid.

the electrical theory stuff, just look up a few youtube videos on ohms law specifically, not ham radio videos just basic electronics ones. it clicks a lot faster when someone draws it out visually. the formula triangles especially. once that part makes sense the rest of the exam feels way more manageable because youre not dreading those questions anymore.

i passed mine last spring and used the ARRL book plus hamstudy on my phone whenever i had a few minutes. the math questions look scarier than they are, theres really only like a handful of different calculation types and they come up over and over so you end up learning them just by doing practice exams. i think i did maybe 10 full practice tests before i felt ready and honestly the real exam felt easier than the practice ones for some reason