so i passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and i got my callsign and everything but im still kind of fuzzy on what frequencies im actually allowed to use. i know i have VHF and UHF mostly but somebody at my club meeting said something about how techs have some HF privileges too and i wasnt sure if he meant like just CW or voice too. i looked at part 97 for about 20 minutes and honestly it kind of made my eyes glaze over, the language is just really dense. is there somewhere that explains this in plain english or does someone just want to give me the quick version of what im working with here

yeah part 97 can be a lot to parse when youre first starting out, dont feel bad about that. the short version for tech is that you get basically everything above 30 MHz which covers 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm and up. for HF your buddy was right, you do get some privileges -- on 10 meters you can do phone between 28.3 and 28.5 MHz and you have CW access on a few other bands like 40m, 15m, and 10m. the ARRL has a band plan chart that lays it all out visually and honestly thats way easier than staring at the actual rule text. just look up ARRL technician privileges and itll be the first result, its a PDF with all the frequencies color coded by license class. once you see it laid out like that it clicks pretty fast.

i was in the same boat when i got my tech. what helped me was just downloading the actual band chart and taping it next to my radio for the first few months so i wasnt second guessing myself every time i wanted to try something. also worth knowing that part 97.301 is specifically the section that covers authorized frequency bands if you ever do want to look it up again, at least that way you can jump straight to the relevant part instead of scrolling through the whole thing