ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i passed my general exam last week so im pretty stoked about that. but im genuinely confused about the 40 meter band and where i can actually operate. like i know theres the phone portion and the cw portion but when i look at different sources they all seem to say slightly different things and some mention a "band plan" which apparently isnt the same as the actual legal allocation??

also someone at my club told me to stay away from the band edges but didnt really explain why. is it just that your signal might drift outside the allowed portion or is there more to it than that. i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to and get in trouble

congrats on the general. so yeah the band plan vs allocation thing trips up a lot of new folks. the actual FCC allocation is the legal part — thats whats in part 97 and you absolutely have to stay within that. for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. the band plan is more like a gentlemens agreement, things like where nets typically hang out or where DX stations operate, nobody is gonna fine you for being in the wrong spot on the band plan but people might get annoyed.

the band edge thing is real practical advice. if youre running USB and your carrier is right at 7.300, your actual transmitted signal is going to be a few kHz above that depending on what youre saying, which puts you outside the allocation. so most people just leave a little buffer, like 7.298 or so, to be safe. your radio isnt always perfectly calibrated either so there's that too.

yeah what he said about the band edge is the main thing honestly. i made that mistake early on, was operating right at 7.300 and someone on the air politely told me i was probably splattering above the edge. felt bad but it was a good lesson. now i just mentally subtract 3 kHz from whatever the edge is and call it good enough.