ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep confusing myself about where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. like i understand theres a portion for technicians and then generals get more but every time i look at a different website i get slightly different numbers and some of them seem outdated

my main confusion is around the 7.125 or so area and whether im supposed to stay away from certain frequencies for DX or if thats just a gentlemans agreement thing. also someone at my club mentioned band edges and said i should stay away from them but didnt really explain why. is there like a hard rule or is it more of a courtesy thing

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 for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 up to 7.300, and CW/digital from 7.025 to 7.125. the 7.000 to 7.025 segment is extra class only for CW.

the band edge thing is real and worth paying attention to. the issue is your signal isnt a perfect single frequency, your SSB signal has a bandwidth, usually around 2.4-3 khz or so depending on your rig and how its set up. so if you set your dial to 7.300 and your upper sideband is spreading above that youre technically out of band even if the dial says youre legal. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge just to be safe. 7.295 or below on the high end is usually the rule of thumb i follow.

as for the DX windows, yeah that's just convention, not FCC rule. like nobody is gonna fine you for operating on 7.175 but you might get some grumpy people complaining in your ear if you park there during a DX pileup. generally just listen first and youll figure out pretty quick where the activity is and what areas people kinda leave open.

yeah what he said about band edges is the main thing that got me when i was new. i actually did transmit slightly out of band once without realizing it because i thought the dial frequency WAS my frequency, didnt understand the whole carrier vs. where the audio actually sits thing on SSB. nobody said anything but i checked with a more experienced guy later and he pointed it out

the ARRL band plan chart is probably the most reliable thing to reference, just google that specifically rather than random sites. some of those third party pages haven't been updated since like 2012 and the allocations did change