ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know there's the license class thing but every chart i look at seems slightly different and i dont want to step on anyone or worse transmit somewhere im not supposed to be.

like the ARRL band plan shows one thing and then i see people talking about band edges being a bad idea and i dont totally understand why. also whats the deal with the lower end of 40 vs the upper end, someone at my club mentioned phone vs cw segments but i got confused when they started talking about it. is there like one definitive place to look this up or do i just have to memorize it

so the short answer is the FCC part 97 is the actual legal document and the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement on top of that. for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 up to 7.300, the extra class guys get the chunk from 7.125 to 7.175 too. cw and data you have a bit more room down lower.

the band edge thing is a real concern because your signal has sidebands and if youre running LSB at say 7.175 exactly your actual signal is spreading down below that into territory you're not supposed to be in. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, some say more depending on how clean your rig is. honestly just start somewhere in the middle of your phone allocation and you'll be fine, dont overthink it at first

yeah i was in the same boat when i upgraded, took me a while to just get comfortable with it. one thing that helped me was just listening a lot before transmitting, you start to notice where the activity actually is and where cw guys hang out vs phone. on 40 phone in the evenings its pretty busy in the 7.2 area, dx guys cluster around 7.074 for FT8 which is data so thats its own thing anyway.

dont stress too much about memorizing every edge perfectly, after a few weeks of operating it just kind of becomes second nature