ok so i just upgraded to general and i've been trying to figure out 40 meters but honestly the band plan stuff is making my head spin. like i know there's a difference between what the FCC actually allocates and what the band plan says but i dont really understand which one i have to follow and which one is just kind of a suggestion?

also someone at my club said something about staying away from band edges and i get why that makes intuitive sense but i dont know how close is too close. my radio shows the frequency im on but i wasnt sure if that's the carrier frequency or something else and whether that matters. im probably overthinking this but i dont want to cause interference or worse get in trouble before ive even really started operating

yeah this trips up a lot of newly minted generals, dont feel bad. so the short version is: the FCC part 97 allocations are the law, the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemen's agreement on top of that. you wont get fined for operating SSB in the middle of the digital segment but people will be annoyed and you might get a call from somebody.

for 40m as a general you can run phone starting at 7.175 up to 7.300, thats your legal slice. the band edge thing is real though -- your signal has sidebands and if you're on LSB and you park yourself right at 7.175 your actual transmitted audio is going to bleed below that. common advice is to stay at least 3 khz inside any edge you care about, so like 7.178 or higher to be safe. some guys say 2 khz is fine if you're being careful about audio bandwidth but 3 is a comfortable buffer. your display shows the suppressed carrier frequency so on LSB the audio content is below that, which is why it matters which edge you're near.

i went through the exact same confusion a few months ago lol. what helped me was just pulling up the actual arrl band plan chart and the part 97 table side by side and kind of mapping them against each other. its tedious but once you do it for like 40 and 20 it kind of clicks for the other bands too. 40 in particular gets complicated because of all the DX window stuff around 7.000 to 7.025 where US stations are supposed to kind of stay out of the way of dx stations working each other, thats not law either but its one of those things where if you ignore it people notice