ok so i passed my general a few months ago and ive been trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i looked up the FCC allocations and then i looked at the ARRL band plan and theyre not exactly the same thing? like the FCC says i can operate from 7.025 to 7.300 but then the band plan has all these different segments for CW only and phone and digital and stuff. so which one do i actually have to follow? is the band plan like a law or is it more of a suggestion. also someone on a net told me to stay away from the band edges which i get but what counts as the band edge exactly, like 7.300 is obviously the edge but how close is too close. sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring all this out

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is the FCC part 97 allocations are the actual law — thats what you legally have to stay inside. the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement that the amateur community came up with to keep things organized and reduce interference. so if you operate phone down in the CW portion of 40m you wont go to jail or lose your license immediately but you will have a bunch of CW operators pretty annoyed at you and honestly it's just bad practice.

as for band edges, the reason people warn you about them is your signal has sidebands. if youre running USB and you tune to exactly 7.300 your actual signal is going to splash above that into frequencies you arent licensed to use. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower for phone. some rigs are worse than others too depending on how well the filtering is set up.

yeah what he said about the sidebands is the big thing people dont realize at first. i actually had someone point out to me early on that when you set your dial to say 7.299 on USB the actual audio frequencies in your voice are going out above that. took me a while to really internalize it. the dial frequency is just the carrier, the signal is wider than that.

also worth knowing that 40m phone allocation in the US starts at 7.175 for generals so dont forget about that lower edge either. theres quite a bit of room between 7.175 and 7.297ish for phone, you dont need to be crowding the top end anyway honestly