General Course, Module 1: Rules of the Bigger Map

1.1Your Privileges and Their Edges

The headline: General class opens every amateur HF band. The fine print: on four of those bands, portions remain off limits, because 80, 40, 20, and 15 meters contain segments where General licensees cannot transmit. Those reserved slices are the segments exclusively allocated to Amateur Extra licensees, and they sit on the same four bands: 80, 40, 20, and 15. Learn one list, answer two questions.

The pattern that organizes it: when Generals do not get the entire voice segment of a band, they get the upper frequency portion of it. The Extra-only exclusives sit at the bottom edges. So a frequency like 21300 kHz sits comfortably inside the General portion of 15 meters, while 7.125 to 7.175 MHz is an example of spectrum where a General cannot be the control operator.

Some bands carry mode restrictions instead of class restrictions. 30 meters is the famous one: phone is prohibited there, and so is image transmission. It is a CW and data band, full stop, and its quiet, narrowband character is the point.

Two more edge cases finish the map. On 10 meters, CW is permitted across the entire band, the one HF band where the key works everywhere. And repeaters on 10 meters live only in the portion above 29.5 MHz.

Finally, sharing. Where the amateur service is secondary on a band, amateur stations must not cause harmful interference to primary users and must accept interference from them. Same rule you learned at Technician, now applied to bands like 30 and 60 meters where hams are guests. Being a guest also imposes affirmative duty: operating where the service is secondary, transmitting spread spectrum, or operating near an FCC monitoring station all require specific steps to avoid harmful interference. All of those conditions.

1.2Good Practice, Beacons, and What You May Retransmit

Part 97 cannot anticipate everything, so it delegates: in all matters not specifically covered by the rules, the station must be operated in accordance with "good engineering and good amateur practice," and the FCC itself determines what that means.

Antenna structures have a regulatory ceiling: 200 feet above ground is the maximum height, not near a public-use airport, before FAA notification and FCC registration are required. Below the federal layer, state and local governments may regulate antennas, but under the PRB-1 standard they must reasonably accommodate amateur communications and impose the minimum practical regulation to accomplish their legitimate purpose. That sentence has won a lot of zoning arguments.

Beacon stations, the propagation transmitters you met in the Technician course, get their own rulebook as you may now run one: their purpose in the rules is observation of propagation and reception, no more than one beacon may transmit in the same band from the same station location, power is limited to 100 watts PEP output, and automatically controlled HF beacons are confined to 28.20 to 28.30 MHz. That is also why operators avoid transmitting on 14.100, 18.110, 21.150, 24.930, and 28.200 MHz: an international network of propagation beacons lives on those frequencies, and covering them up blinds everyone.

What may any amateur station retransmit or transmit one-way? A short, specific list:

• Occasional retransmission of weather and propagation forecast information from US government stations is permitted.
• One-way transmissions to assist with learning the International Morse code are permitted, which is why code-practice broadcasts are legal.
• Abbreviations and procedural signals may be used as long as they do not obscure the meaning of a message. Efficiency is fine; secrecy is not, the same principle as the Technician encryption rule.

And who may you talk to across borders? Amateurs in any country, except those whose administrations have notified the ITU that they object to such communications.

1.3Power, and the Bands With Asterisks

The default HF power limit is 1500 watts PEP output, and PEP output from the transmitter is exactly the measurement the rules specify. That default covers most of the map: 1500 watts on 160 meters (1.8 MHz), 1500 watts on 12 meters, 1500 watts on 10 meters (28 MHz) for a General.

Two bands carry asterisks:

• 30 meters (10.140 MHz): 200 watts PEP maximum. The quiet band stays quiet by rule.
• 60 meters is the strangest real estate in amateur radio: a secondary allocation shared with federal users, with its own operating requirements. Two examples the pool keeps: USB signals there are limited to a maximum bandwidth of 2.8 kHz, and if you use an antenna other than a dipole, you must keep a record of your antenna's gain. The band's structure is also in transition following recent FCC rule changes, which is why several 60-meter questions were withdrawn from this pool. Ray's operational advice: before operating 60 meters, check the current FCC rules for the band that week, and mean it.

One rule in this group governs the digital future instead of power: before using a new digital protocol on the air, its technical characteristics must be publicly documented. Amateur radio welcomes new modes, and rejects secret ones, the same open-service principle wearing a data format.

1.4The Day You Pass, and the Table You Will Sit Behind

Here is the part of the rules that applies to you personally within minutes of passing.

Walk out of the session with your CSCE, the Certificate of Successful Completion of Examination, and you may use General privileges immediately, on any General or Technician band segment, before the FCC database updates. The condition: identify with "AG" after your call sign whenever operating with your new General privileges. The CSCE is valid for exam element credit for 365 days.

Expired licenses get a partial mercy rule: anyone who can demonstrate they once held an FCC-issued General, Advanced, or Amateur Extra license (not revoked) can receive credit for those elements. Past the two-year grace period, the path back is proof of the expired license grant plus passing the current Element 2 (Technician) exam. The knowledge credit survives; the license itself does not.

Now the table. As a General, you can join the Volunteer Examiner corps, and the exam wants the staffing rules:

• VEs are accredited by a Volunteer Examiner Coordinator, not by the FCC directly.
• Minimum age: 18.
• A non-US citizen may serve as a VE, provided they hold an FCC-granted amateur license of General class or above.
• As a General-class VE, you may administer Technician exams only. Three VEs of General class or higher must observe a Technician exam session.

Remote operation closes the group with two clean rules. Operating a US station by remote control from outside the country requires a US operator/primary station license, because the station is a US station no matter where your fingers are. Flip it around, and operating a station in another country over the internet from the US puts you under only that country's regulations, because the transmitter is theirs.

1.5Control, Third Parties, and the Automatic Stations

The last group collects the rules governing who and what is behind a transmission.

Third parties first, now with an HF twist, because your General license makes international third-party traffic real. Messages to a third party in a country with a Third-Party Agreement must relate to amateur radio, or remarks of a personal character, or emergencies and disaster relief. One disqualifier the exam checks: a person whose amateur license was revoked and not reinstated may not participate as a third party. And third-party messages may be sent via remote control under any circumstances where third-party traffic is otherwise permitted; the control link does not change the rules.

The world is carved into three ITU regions, and North and South America are Region 2. Region determines frequency allocations, which is why a band chart from Europe (Region 1) does not match yours.

Repeater cross-band rules produce one specific scenario: a 10-meter repeater may retransmit the 2-meter signal of a Technician-controlled station only if the 10-meter repeater's control operator holds at least a General class license, because the retransmission on 10 meters happens under the repeater control operator's privileges.

Automatically controlled digital stations, the robots of the band, get a fenced yard: they may communicate with each other only in limited segments of some HF bands (and anywhere on 6 meters and shorter wavelengths). Outside those segments, a contact with an automatic station is legal only if the station initiating it is under local or remote control, meaning a human is on at least one end. Spread spectrum, while we are near it, is capped at 10 watts PEP.

One last boundary: the 2.4 GHz amateur band overlaps consumer Wi-Fi, and amateur stations may communicate with non-licensed Wi-Fi stations in no part of it. Same hardware, different services, no mixing.