ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i finally feel comfortable enough to actually get on HF but im completely lost on the frequency thing. like i know generals have some restrictions vs extra class but when i look at the band charts its honestly just confusing. on 40 meters specifically, i see numbers like 7.175 and 7.300 thrown around but i dont know if those are hard limits or like suggestions or what. also somebody at the club meeting mentioned something about band edges and said i should stay away from them but didnt really explain why. is there a simple way to think about this or do i just need to memorize the whole chart

yeah the band edge thing trips up a lot of new generals. so the FCC allocations are the legal hard limits, you absolutely cannot transmit outside those. for 40m phone as a general you can operate from 7.175 up to 7.300 MHz. the reason people say avoid the band edge is because your signal has sidebands, so if youre running SSB and you set your VFO to exactly 7.300 you could actually have audio components going above that and technically be out of band. most people just stay a few kHz inside the edge to be safe, like dial up to 7.295 or so and youre fine. the ARRL band plan is a little different from the FCC allocations btw, the band plan stuff like where CW vs phone vs digital goes is more of a gentleman's agreement than law, but people get pretty grumpy if you ignore it. worth downloading the ARRL band plan PDF and just keeping it handy for a while til it becomes second nature.

just went through this same confusion a few months ago honestly. what helped me was realizing theres two separate things, whats legal (FCC part 97) and whats the gentlemens agreement (band plan). you can get the Technician/General privileges chart straight from the ARRL website and its color coded which makes it way easier to read than trying to parse the actual regulations. the band edge thing is real though, had a guy at a club tell me he got a nastygram from a neighbor station once because he was basically sitting right on 7.300 and his audio was spilling over. not worth the hassle just stay a couple kHz down