ok so i passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and ive been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what im actually allowed to do and honestly its kind of confusing. like i get that i have HF privileges on 10 meters and some other spots but the rules about what kind of emissions are allowed where are kind of hard to parse. for example i was looking at 10 meter phone and it says 28.3 to 28.5 MHz but then theres all this language about authorized emission types and i dont know if that means i can use any mode in that segment or just SSB or what. also saw something about third party traffic rules and now im worried i said something wrong when i let my non-ham friend talk into the mic at a club meetup last week. was that even legal? i dont want to get in trouble before ive even really started

dont panic, youre probably fine with the third party thing as long as you were the control operator and the other person wasnt saying anything you wouldnt be comfortable with on a public channel. the rule is basically that a licensed ham has to be in control of the station at all times, so as long as you were right there supervising it and could have stopped transmission at any point youre good. now the third party traffic restrictions only really come into play when youre communicating with certain countries that dont have third party agreements with the US, so on a local repeater with your buddy that really shouldnt be an issue at all.

on the emission types question, yeah part 97 can be a bit dense to read. for tech HF privileges the short answer is on the 10m phone segment you can do SSB, AM, that sort of thing. ARRL has a pretty readable privileges chart that honestly explains it better than the actual rule text does, id just google that and bookmark it.

i was in the same boat about 8 months ago and the third party thing tripped me up too. one thing that helped me was just downloading the actual part 97 document and using ctrl+f to search for whatever specific thing im confused about rather than trying to read the whole thing front to back, that way is just brutal honestly. and yeah the ARRL band plan is way easier to read than the FCC version for figuring out where you can operate