Michelle Baker

welcome to the hobby. the FT-60 is a solid little radio to start on, your uncle gave you a good one. i ran mine for almost two years before i upgraded to a mobile rig. once you get your general you should look into some of the digital modes too, FT8 is a great way to make contacts without having to worry so much about what to say on voice

i just did mine like 3 months ago so pretty fresh. i used hamstudy pretty much exclusively and passed first try. took me maybe 3 weeks studying on my phone during lunch breaks and stuff. the electrical questions were the only part that tripped me up at first, like the ohms law stuff, but there's a handful of formulas and once you do enough practice questions you just remember which one goes where. dont overthink it

i did mine like 8 months ago and just used hamstudy the whole time, took me maybe 3 weeks studying like 20 minutes a day on my lunch break. passed first try with a 91%. the book might be worth it if you want to actually dig into the material but for just passing the test its probably overkill. one thing i'd say is dont skip the questions about operating procedures and the band privileges stuff, i thought id be fine on those and almost got tripped up. also check if your area has a local club doing a license class, mine had a free one and the elmer there was super helpful for the stuff that didnt make sense just reading it off a screen

one thing i'd add — if you do decide to enable digipeating, make sure you set your UIDIGI or equivalent alias handling correctly in direwolf otherwise you'll end up passing packets you shouldn't be or not passing ones you should. the WIDE1-1 and WIDE2-1 path stuff trips people up. there's a good section in the direwolf user guide on this, the Bob Bruninga stuff too if you can find his old documentation, rest his soul, he really built out all the theory behind how paths are supposed to work and a lot of that context makes the config options make way more sense