ok so ive been a general for about 3 months now and i keep second guessing myself every time i sit down at the radio. i know generals have more privileges than technicians but im not totally clear on like, where the cutoff is on 40 meters. i hear people talking all over the place and then sometimes i tune around and hear stuff that sounds like its pretty close to the band edge and i dont know if im allowed to be there or not.

like is there a hard rule about staying away from the band edges? i think i read something about keeping your signal within the allocation meaning if youre doing ssb you have to account for the bandwidth so your carrier frequency needs to be a few khz in from the edge? or did i misread that. and also whats the deal with the lower part of 40, i thought i heard digital modes down there but sometimes there's ssb too and i get confused about what the band plan actually means vs what the actual license rules say

sorry if this is a dumb question just want to make sure im not accidentally transmitting somewhere i shouldnt be

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the actual FCC allocation for 40m general class SSB starts at 7.175 MHz and goes up to 7.300. below that down to 7.025 is CW only for general, and technicians dont get anything on 40 HF at all except some CW privileges i think.

the band edge thing you mentioned is real. your transmitted signal has to stay within the allocation, not just your carrier. so if you're on USB and your carrier is at 7.300 you've got sideband energy going above that which puts you outside the band. most people just stay at 7.299 or a little lower to be safe. some rigs have a setting that warns you when youre close to a band edge which is handy.

the band plan stuff like where digital modes typically live vs phone vs cw is kind of a gentleman's agreement thing, not actually law. the ARRL publishes a band plan that most people follow but strictly speaking nobody's going to lose their license for doing ssb at 7.080 even though that's usually digital territory. people will probably complain on the air though lol

yeah what he said. also just download the arrl band plan pdf and tape it to your wall or whatever, thats what i did when i was starting out. took me a while to really internalize it but eventually you just kinda know where to go without thinking about it.

one thing that always confused me early on was that the band plan and the part 97 rules are two completely different things and people mix them up constantly even guys who've been licensed forever. the rules are what you legally have to follow, the band plan is more like etiquette. both matter but for different reasons