ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i passed my general back in september and i thought i understood the band plan but honestly every time i sit down and actually try to operate i second guess myself. like on 40 meters i know there's a phone portion and a cw portion but the charts i find online all look slightly different from each other and one of them says something about 7.175 being some kind of informal boundary and another one doesnt mention that at all.

also whats the deal with band edges, someone at my club told me to never operate right at the edge but didnt really explain why. is it a legal thing or just like a courtesy thing. i dont want to accidentally operate outside my privledges or cause problems for anyone

the band edge thing is mostly a practical issue rather than a hard rule — your radio's VFO might show 7.300 but depending on how your transmitter is aligned and what mode you're in, part of your signal could actually be spilling above that. with SSB especially, if you're on upper sideband your signal occupies a chunk of spectrum above the carrier frequency, so if you park at 7.300 you're almost certainly going out of band. most people stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower.

as for the general privileges on 40m, you get 7.175 to 7.300 for phone. below 7.175 is extra class territory for phone. the 7.025 to 7.125 range is where you'll find cw. there are also digital modes mixed in there depending on what band plan version you're looking at — the ARRL has a suggested plan but it's not law, just what people generally follow. the FCC part 97 rules are what actually matter legally, and those just give you the frequency ranges, not the sub-band stuff.

yeah same thing confused me when i was starting out. the charts people post online sometimes mix up the FCC allocations with the ARRL suggested band plan and they're not the same thing at all. one is legal and one is just kind of a gentlemans agreement type thing. i just bookmarked the actual part 97 page and that cleared a lot of it up for me, even though its not exactly fun reading lol