ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now (general class) and i keep getting confused about the 40 meter band. like i know theres a chart somewhere but every time i look it up i get a different answer depending on the website. some say phone starts at 7.175 and some say 7.225 and im not sure which one is actually current or if it changed at some point.

also whats the deal with the band edges, like can i actually transmit right at 7.300 or do i need to stay a little below it? someone at my club mentioned something about keeping your signal inside the band but i dont really understand what that means in practice. like does my whole signal have to fit inside or just the carrier frequency or what

just trying to not accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be, figured someone here would know

the band edge thing is actually really important and a lot of new generals get caught on this. your carrier frequency isnt the only thing that matters — an SSB signal takes up maybe 2.4-3 kHz of bandwidth, so if you set your dial to 7.300 you're actually splattering signal above the band edge and technically out of your allocation. most people say stay at least 3 kHz below the upper edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower if you're on upper sideband.

as for the 7.175 vs 7.225 thing, the FCC updated the allocations back in 2012 i think and generals got a chunk of the phone portion expanded down. so 7.175 is correct for where general phone starts now, 7.225 was the old limit. the ARRL band plan chart on their website should have the current version, just make sure youre not looking at a cached old page or something.

yeah same thing confused me when i was studying. the band plan stuff in the technician book doesnt really prepare you for 40m at all since techs barely get anything there. what helped me was just downloading the actual ARRL band plan PDF and keeping it open on my phone for a while until it clicked. also the part about your whole signal needing to stay inside the allocation -- yeah thats the real rule, not just the carrier, learned that the hard way when someone on the air pointed out i was too close to 7.300 and probably bleeding over