ok so ive had my general for about 3 months now and i still get confused about the 40 meter band. like i know there are portions i can use and portions i cant but every time i look it up i get a different answer depending on what website im on. some say 7.175 is fine some say stay below that. and then theres the whole thing about the band edge, someone at the club told me to never operate within like 3 khz of the edge but didnt really explain why. is that just a courtesy thing or is there an actual rule? also what even happens at 7.300 like is that a hard cutoff or is there some wiggle room. sorry if this is a dumb question im just trying to not accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely trips people up. so the short version for US general class on 40m is you get 7.175 to 7.300 for phone. 7.300 is the hard upper edge of the amateur allocation in the US so you absolutely do not want your signal going past that. the reason people say stay a few khz away from the edge is because your signal has sidebands and if you're running USB and you set your dial to 7.299 your actual transmitted audio is going above 7.300 which puts you outside the band. that's not a courtesy thing that's an actual violation. the 3 khz number is a bit conservative depending on your bandwidth but its a safe habit. lower edge for generals on 40 phone is 7.175 so between 7.175 and roughly 7.295 or so you're pretty safe. below 7.175 is extra class only for phone in the US. the band plan stuff like where cw lives versus digital versus phone is more of a gentlemens agreement coordinated by the ARRL, its not law but people get grumpy if you ignore it

yeah what he said. also worth downloading the actual ARRL band plan pdf and just keeping it somewhere handy, took me forever to actually do that and it cleared up so much confusion. one thing that got me early on was realizing the FCC rules and the band plan are two seperate things. FCC tells you the legal limits, band plan is more like where people have agreed to do what by convention. you can technically be legal and still annoy everyone by parking an ssb signal in the middle of the cw portion lol. for 40m specifically its also worth knowing that depending on where you are in the world the allocations are different, like in europe 40m phone doesnt even start until 7.100 so if you're working dx you might hear stations way down in there that would be illegal for you to use