A random plug for https://hamstudy.org/

The US ham test question pools are fully public. Your test will be a mixture of questions from the pool. HamStudy basically lets you churn the question pool, and then will offer explainer text / references to back up each question and correct answer.

I went on a vacation and used their phone app any time I was standing in a line. You can set it to just keep spinning through the questions, with a bias towards ones you're getting wrong.

Take a look at Extra too. You may find that it actually isn't much harder than General.

The Extra exam is 50 multiple choice questions broken down by category as follows:

  6 Commission Rules
  5 Operating Procedures
  3 Radio Wave Propagation
  5 Amateur Practices
  4 Electrical Principles
  6 Circuit Components
  6 Practical Circuits
  3 Signals and Emissions
  8 Antennas and Transmission Lines
  4 Safety

Within each category there are subcategories. "Antennas and Transmission Lines" for example has 8 subcategories. The 8 questions in "Antennas and Transmission Lines" are one from each of those subcategories. The question pools for these subcategories each have 10-14 questions.

If you compare to the closest corresponding categories/subcategories from the General and Technician exam you'll probably find that there are a few cases.

1. The Extra is just more of the same. It's not harder per se. "Commission Rules" for example.

2. The Extra goes goes deeper and also adds new material that is more advanced.

3. The Extra is in new territory.

If you get to the point where the Technician and General are going to no problem, then you will probably have no trouble getting to the point where case #1 is also no problem, and case #2 is also well in hand. It is #3 where you might have trouble.

But remember that you can get 13 wrong and still pass!

Pick say 10 subcategories that are in case #3 that look like they would be the hardest to get good at and just write them off.

For example in "Antennas and Transmission Lines" you might decide that the "Smith chart" subcategory, which has a pool of 14 questions, would take a lot of time to get good at. So skip it. That's 14 less potential questions you have to be prepared to answer, leaving more time to study for things in class #2 and the class #3 things that look most doable.

It doesn't cost extra to take the Extra test at the same session that you take the Technician and General tests, and there is no penalty for failing, so might as well go for it.

it’s stuff like this that make me wish i lived in the US. i have to memorise a long questionnaire in german if i want to get my license

Great advice!

There's something to note here.

As someone who's always dabbled in electronics, skimmed and read some books, my primary complaint abot most electronics texts is that they just talk about individual topics: oscillators, amplifiers, etc.

What they never talk about, is putting them all together.

But as witnessed by this list, that's what a radio is. A collection of these "meta" components into a whole to get a better radio experience.

A radio built like this, with individual subsystems connected together, is much more understandable. Many (not all) radio schematics are presented as a whole, rather than the parts, or why you might (or might not) want to change one part or another (not components, but one, say, filter circuit to a different one).

It just seems to me that once you get past some basic theory, starting with a radio, and then systematically taking it apart is a better way of approaching electronics education.

> You can use a germanium diode or even Shottky now instead of a “crystal”.

Or a razor blade or a piece of roofing lead and a needle.

I have used a synchronous AM detector once in a radio, its a game changer for listening to shortwave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GxL13rid1w

I did many years ago. Absolutely worth it.

I work in software now, but I have an electrical engineering degree and started my career on a project developing a radio. Our project probably had ten or more electrical engineers on it, and only one or two of them really understood the RF side of it. It's a very specialized skill -- even EEs with >20 years of experience would describe things as black magic.

So I don't think you're alone feeling this way. Even with a good foundation in the theory and math, I think most people hit a wall with radios at some point. All the people I worked with who intuitively "got" RF stuff had been doing nothing else professionally for over a decade.

Antennas are really black magic: optimizing an antenna requires stocastich method like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, etc. Moreover if you want to model the radiation patterns and the electrical characteristics you need to use finite element calculation methods. So, you need a lot of computation power as antenna are not a problem that can be solved in a closed form.

Source: I almost burnt my PC on simulating a dipole array while studying for the antennas course at the university

Even just the theory is kind of mind expanding. I've done a little signal processing and ideas like "negative frequency" sound absurd up front and then seem reasonable once you've worked with them.

I assure you, that doesn't go away in electrical engineering or even theoretical physics. Electromagnetism exhibits a large degree of behavioral emergence. It's one of the most well studied aspects of physics, but remains a rather convoluted and seemingly arbitrary puzzle box of nonsense especially at a macroscopic level.

I've had my ham license for ten years, but I've only ever used a basic car-based mobile setup and my handhelds. My morse code speed is abysmal. QRP and all that are really cool, but I just use ham radio to supplement my fire/ems handheld in a natural disaster.

I'd love to see more people on the air. My advice is to get a radio with a good tuner, build a simple dipole with the online calculators, and try to make contacts that way.

It gets crazier when you start talking about things like a Tarana BN. The amount of processing in them is pretty insane.

But yeah, black magic is right!

To be fair, I think most people regard “not advanced math” to exclude trig, and maybe algebra too. Fear and loathing of math is a thing.