ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40m band. i know i have more privileges now but honestly the band plan stuff is confusing me. like i keep seeing people say "dont operate near the band edge" but what does that even mean exactly, is it 100hz away, 1khz, more? and i was looking at the arrl band plan vs the actual fcc allocation and they dont seem to match up perfectly which is making my head hurt.

also someone at my club said something about the lower part of 40m being mostly CW and the phone portion starting higher up but i cant find a clear simple explanation of where the cutoffs are. i was just trying to call CQ on 7.245 and some guy came on after and said i was "too close to the edge" which i thought was weird because i looked it up and i thought generals could go down to like 7.175 for phone. did i misunderstand something or was that guy just being weird about it

so the FCC allocation for general class on 40m phone is 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, that part you had right. 7.245 is fine, the guy probably just had a bee in his bonnet about something. now the "band edge" thing is a seperate issue -- the concern there is that if youre running USB on say 7.300 and your signal has any width to it at all, sidebands can bleed above 7.300 which is out of band. most people say stay at least 3khz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 max for the upper end. on the lower end at 7.175 same idea, dont park right on 7.175.000 because your signal isnt a perfect knife edge.

the arrl band plan is just a gentlemens agreement, it doesnt have the force of law like the fcc allocations do. its more like suggestions for where different modes tend to cluster so people can find each other. doesnt mean you CANT operate outside those suggestions, just means you might be in the middle of a net or a pileup you didnt know about

yeah i went through the same confusion when i upgraded, took me a while to sort out what was an actual rule vs what was just convention. one thing that helped me was just downloading the arrl band chart pdf and keeping it near the radio for a while. the other thing -- 7.245 is actually a pretty busy frequency, theres some nets that use it depending on time of day and region so that might have been what that guy was annoyed about, not so much the band edge thing. hard to say without knowing more context