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 Previous: ARRL Headquarters TIS Coordinator Al Alvareztorres, AA1DO, SK |  Next: Gravitational Soldering |
By David Sumner, K1ZZ
ARRL Chief Executive Officer
April 1, 2003
Editor's note: Typically, only ARRL members get to read the "It Seems to Us ..." editorials that run each month in QST. We're posting this editorial by ARRL Executive Vice President David Sumner, K1ZZ, that appears in the April 2003 issue of QST in the hope that both ARRL members and nonmembers might appreciate it and find it informative.
As this issue of QST begins to reach ARRL members there are about ten weeks remaining before the delegates to the World Radiocom-munication Conference, WRC-03, begin to assemble in Geneva. The lion's share of the preparatory work has been done. Regional and national proposals addressing the more than three dozen agenda items have been prepared. Where do things stand with regard to the key agenda item for radio amateurs, realignment of the allocations around 7 MHz to eliminate the overlap between amateurs in the Americas (Region 2) and broadcasters elsewhere (Regions 1 and 3)?
There is encouraging news. Thanks to the efforts of International Amateur Radio Union volunteers and other supporters of Amateur Radio there are now more than 30 countries that have gone on record as supporting one of two favorable formulas for realignment. We need more and should be able to get more, but this is a good start.
The most popular method of realignment is the one called Method B in the CPM Report (see February 2003 QST, p 79). This approach calls for a transition to be accomplished in three stages. On January 1, 2005, amateur stations in Regions 1 and 3 would be allowed to use 7100-7200 kHz on a secondary basis. Broadcasting stations in Regions 1 and 3 would be allowed to continue using this part of the band until April 1, 2007; on that date they would shift into the band 7350-7450 kHz and 7100-7200 kHz would be allocated to the amateur, fixed, and certain mobile services on a primary basis. The final stage would occur on October 25, 2009, when broadcasting stations would shift out of 7200-7300 kHz and into 7450-7550 kHz, amateurs would gain exclusive use of 7100-7200 kHz, and the band 7200-7300 kHz would be allocated on a primary basis to the amateur, fixed, and certain mobile services. Thus, when the dust settles amateurs would have access to 7000-7300 kHz worldwide, albeit with 100 kHz shared with fixed and mobile stations in Regions 1 and 3, and broadcasters would have access to 7300-7550 kHz worldwide. Here in Region 2 the 7000-7300 kHz allocation would remain unchanged as exclusively amateur, but we would finally be free of broadcasting interference throughout the 300-kHz amateur band and would have a much easier time cohabiting with fixed and mobile outside the Americas than we have had with the high-powered broadcasters.
Method B is now a European Common Proposal (ECP) that has been initially supported by 17 CEPT administrations: Austria, Denmark, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Estonia, Belgium, Slovak Republic, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Lithuania, Finland, Poland and Bulgaria. Congratulations are due to IARU Region 1 and its member-societies in these countries, whose volunteers have been working ever since the closing gavel of WRC-2000 to achieve an acceptable ECP on this difficult issue. At least three other countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific have also expressed support for Method B. The IARU team is now working hard to gain the support of additional administrations in Regions 1 and 3, either for Method B or Method A (which is similar, but without the sharing with fixed and mobile).
Here in the Americas IARU Region 2 has been hard at work along similar lines. A notable breakthrough was achieved at a CITEL meeting in Orlando in early February, when 12 countries agreed to support an Inter-American Proposal (IAP) that is virtually the same as CPM Method D. The proposal calls for a three-stage process leading to 7000-7300 kHz being exclusively amateur, worldwide, with broadcasting in Regions 1 and 3 at 7300-7550 kHz and broadcasting in Region 2 at 7300-7350 kHz. Canada, the original sponsor, was joined by Argentina, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, and Peru. IARU Region 2 is now working to expand the list of Region 2 countries supporting the IAP.
An obvious question is: Where is the United States? The US has long supported a 300-kHz worldwide, exclusive allocation for the amateur service. At the major World Administrative Radio Conferences in 1979 and 1992 the US proposed to realign the amateur and broadcasting allocations to provide for the amateur requirement of a 300-kHz worldwide allocation. In 1995 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) study U.S. National Spectrum Requirements: Projections and Trends noted this requirement and observed that a realignment to a worldwide amateur allocation of 6900-7200 kHz "is consistent with proposals made by the United States at WARC-92." The FCC WRC-03 Advisory Committee has recommended that Method A be a US proposal. Unfortunately, this has not yet been agreed to by the NTIA. Acting on behalf of the federal government users of the radio spectrum, the NTIA has been advocating "no proposal" from the US, a position that the ARRL is working hard to overcome. A small number of federal agencies claim to be concerned that their backup circuits on HF would be affected by an upward shift of broadcasters. This is difficult to understand and accept, given that their even greater concerns about losing spectrum below 7 MHz already have been accommodated and that the usefulness to them of the 7300-7600 kHz range is severely limited by the extensive out-of-band broadcasting already taking place there.
Also unfortunate is that some broadcasters persist in trying to link the 7-MHz agenda item with another about the adequacy of broadcasting spectrum between 4 and 10 MHz, a separate issue with an entirely different genesis. In the meantime the shift of major international broadcasters away from HF continues, with Deutsche Welle the latest to announce that they will cease HF broadcasting to North America, Australia, and New Zealand on March 30, 2003.
The next few months, until WRC-03 ends on July 4, promise to be very interesting indeed. Stay tuned!
| Previous: ARRL Headquarters TIS Coordinator Al Alvareztorres, AA1DO, SK | Next: Gravitational Soldering |
