okay so i passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and ive been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what frequencies i can actually use and its honestly kind of confusing. like i know i get HF privileges on 10 meters but only certain modes? and then theres the whole thing about phone vs data vs cw and i cant quite figure out where the line is. also someone at my club told me techs can use 15 meters for something but i cant find that in the rules anywhere, maybe he was wrong?

also separate question kind of - is there any rule about how long you have to wait between transmissions or is that just courtesy stuff people made up? i dont want to accidentally violate something and lose my license before i even really get started lol

the 15 meter thing your club guy mentioned is probably just confusion, techs dont get 15m phone privileges. what you do get on HF is pretty limited - you can do CW on a small slice of 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters, and then on 10m you get some SSB and data too. the exact frequencies are in part 97.301 if you want to look it up, or just google the ARRL frequency chart, its way easier to read than the actual FCC document honestly.

the waiting between transmissions thing - theres no hard rule like you must wait X seconds between overs or anything. the rules that do exist are more about not monopolizing a frequency and identifying every 10 minutes during a contact and at the end. the rest is just operating practice that people treat like rules sometimes.

yeah i was in the same boat when i got my tech, part 97 reads like legal gobbledygook. one thing that tripped me up too was the third party traffic rules, like you can have someone talk through your radio to a foreign country but only if the US has an agreement with that country. never actually ran into that in practice but its one of those things that sounds way more complicated than it is i think