ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, tech class, and i keep reading conflicting stuff online about what HF privileges i actually have. like i know theres something about 10 meters and maybe some CW on other bands but every time i look it up i find something slightly different and im not sure which source to trust. the ARRL site has one thing, some random blog has another thing, and someone at my local club told me something completely different from both of those.

can someone just explain in plain english what part 97 actually says a tech can do on HF? and is there like an official place to look this up that isnt confusing? i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to and get in trouble

yeah this trips up a lot of new hams, the privileges chart on the FCC website is honestly not that easy to read the first time. basically as a tech you get voice on 10m from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz, and then you have CW privileges on portions of 80, 40, 15, and 10 as well. the exact frequencies are spelled out in part 97.301 if you want to look at the actual rule. the FCC part 97 document itself is really the authoritative source, everything else is someone interpreting it.

the ARRL band plan chart is usually pretty reliable and matches what 97.301 says, but yeah some old blog posts floating around have outdated info especially anything written before 2012 or so. i'd just bookmark the ecfr.gov page for part 97 and go straight to the source when you're unsure.

oh man i was in the exact same spot a few months back lol. what finally helped me was just downloading the actual part 97 text as a pdf and ctrl+f searching for whatever i needed. its dense but at least you know its not someones interpretation. also the technician band privileges havent changed in a while so anything recent should be accurate, just watch out for old forum posts saying stuff that might be outdated