Tool
Band Plan Lookup
Type a frequency and pick your license class. It tells you whether you may transmit there, on what, and at what power.
Three classes are issued today — Technician, General and Amateur Extra. Advanced is here because licenses granted before 2000 stay valid and renewable, and they carry HF phone segments General does not. Novice is grandfathered too but is not covered by this tool; its band set differs too much to fold in safely.
Band plan by licence class
Every class is shown, so you can see how the privileges nest. General is highlighted; the dimmed rows are the other classes.
Rows are E xtra, A dvanced, G eneral and T echnician; bands where every class has the same privileges collapse to a single row. Each band is drawn to its own width, so 30 m (50 kHz) and 10 m (1.7 MHz) occupy the same space — boundary frequencies are labelled beneath each band. Click any segment to load it into the lookup above.
Sub-band edges change and the FCC rules are what govern. Confirm against the ARRL band plan and 47 CFR Part 97 before you key up somewhere unfamiliar. This tool covers US privileges only.
Reading the result
US HF bands are split into segments by license class and by mode. The pattern is consistent once you see it: Extra holds the bottom slice of each band, Advanced the next, then General. Those bottom slices are where rare DX tends to operate, which is the practical argument for upgrading.
Two bands break the pattern and are worth remembering. 30 m allows no phone at all — CW and data only, 200 W — and 60 m is five fixed channelsrather than a band, at 100 W ERP. Both catch people out.
Technicians have more HF than most realise: CW on 80, 40 and 15 m, and on 10 m both data and SSB phone between 28.300 and 28.500. When the solar cycle cooperates, that 10 m phone allocation reaches the other side of the world on a wire.
For what each band is actually like to operate, see Reading Propagation, and for the full frequency tables see the reference page.