ok so i passed my tech exam a few months ago and ive been on 2m mostly just doing local repeater stuff which is fine but i want to start doing more HF stuff and i honestly cannot figure out what part 97 actually allows me to do on HF as a tech. like i know i get some HF privileges but every time i try to look it up i end up on some page that just lists frequencies and i dont really understand what im allowed to actually DO on those frequencies, like can i do SSB on 10m or is it just CW down there. also someone at my club said something about the phone segment being different for techs vs generals and i got even more confused. i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to, it feels like a pretty big deal

yeah the tech HF privileges are kind of a weird patchwork honestly. so basically as a tech you get CW privileges on a bunch of HF bands — 80m, 40m, 15m, and 10m i think — but the 10m situation is the one people always ask about because yeah you do get a small phone/SSB segment on 10m as a tech, its 28.300 to 28.500 MHz. thats the only HF band where you can actually do voice as a tech. everything else on HF for you is CW only until you upgrade. the ARRL website has a band plan chart that actually shows this pretty clearly, way better than trying to read the actual part 97 text which is kind of brutal to parse if you're not used to legal language. definitely worth bookmarking. and yeah your club guy is right that the phone segment thing is different by license class, the FCC splits up the band allocations that way specifically

i was in the same boat when i got my tech, took me forever to figure out the 10m phone thing. ended up just downloading the arrl band chart as a pdf and keeping it on my phone. also just a heads up, even once you know the rules, its worth double checking your radio is actually set to the right mode before you transmit cause i almost keyed up in the wrong segment once when i was messing with the settings and wasnt paying attention