ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40 meter band but honestly the ARRL band plan and the actual FCC allocations are kind of confusing me. like i get that generals have phone privileges starting at 7.175 but then i keep hearing people say dont go too close to the band edge and i dont really understand what that means exactly. is there like a buffer zone i should stay away from? and whats the deal with 7.125 to 7.175 being listed as advanced/extra only on some charts but not others. also someone at the club said something about the lower part of 40 being all CW and data but i see SSB down there sometimes on my radio. im probably overthinking this but i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be

yeah the band edge thing trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. basically the issue is your signal has a certain bandwidth, so if you tune your dial to say 7.300 which is the top of the US 40m allocation, your actual transmitted signal is going to spread above that depending on your SSB suppressed carrier offset and audio bandwidth. most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or below just to not splatter outside the band. the FCC doesnt care that your dial said 7.300 if your signal was actually at 7.302.

as for the lower portion yeah 7.000 to 7.125 in the US is CW and digital only for everyone, generals included. the SSB you might hear down there could be foreign stations, the 40m band internationally only goes to 7.200 in some ITU regions so you get a lot of overlap and DX stations operating down where US hams cant do phone. its one of the weird things about 40m specifically.

the advanced class thing on old charts is because advanced was a real license class up until like 2000 or whenever they stopped issuing them, some people still hold them. but for practical purposes now its basically just tech, general, and extra so dont worry about those old charts too much they can be misleading. your general phone on 40 starts at 7.175 and runs up to 7.300 and thats it, extras get down to 7.125 for phone. i made the mistake of going to 7.150 like two weeks after i got my general because i thought i read it wrong and someone on the repeater very nicely pointed out i was in extra territory lol. just double check the current ARRL privileges chart on their website, its pretty clear once you get used to reading it