I’m studying for Amateur Extra now, and the memorization strategy has hit a wall. The Extra pool is dense with theory — reactance, Smith charts, filter design, propagation modes — and you can brute-force your way to a passing grade without ever building an intuition for any of it. I could probably still do it. But I’d be doing exactly what I did for General, and I’d walk away from the test knowing less than the license claims I do.

Plenty of hams live for the contact — the rare DX on the other side of the planet, the ragchew that runs past midnight, the contest sprint. I respect it. It’s just not the part that pulls me. What pulls me is the bench. The soldering iron, the oscilloscope, the moment a circuit I built does the thing physics said it would. I’m an edge-case ham: I do less operating and more tinkering, because I was in this for the electronics long before I ever keyed a mic.