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 Previous: FCC Turns Away ARRL Challenge over Part 15 Authority | ![Next (later) Story](/images/sty-up.gif "Things "Heating Up Quickly" in Montana"){kind=small} Next: Things "Heating Up Quickly" in Montana |
By David Sumner, K1ZZ
ARRL Chief Executive Officer
August 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 that appears in the August 2003 issue of QST in the hope that both ARRL members and nonmembers might appreciate it and find it informative.
The words on this page are being written in Geneva on June 23, as the third of four weeks of the 2003 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-03) gets underway. This issue of QST will not be printed and distributed until after the final gavel falls, on July 4. Thus the writer, who is in Geneva as a member of the observer team of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU), is in a position similar to that of a sports writer who must describe the entire Super Bowl, having seen only the first half of the game. In fact it's even worse than that. There is no way to keep score at a WRC, where meetings work on the basis of consensus and not by vote; it would be foolhardy to predict the outcome of such a process halfway through. By the time you receive this issue of QST, as an ARRL member you will have had access to electronic news of the conference outcome for at least a week or two. Anything said here about where things stand at halftime will be stale news indeed.
So, what can we say about WRC-03? There are more than 2600 registered participants, although not everyone is staying for the full four weeks. Perhaps the most striking contrast to recent conferences is what is not happening. At WRC-97 in Geneva and WRC-2000 in Istanbul there were lavish receptions hosted by commercial satellite companies to which all participants were invited. There were no such receptions this year, a reflection of the declining fortunes of the telecommunications industry. The IARU traditionally hosts a reception for 150-200 key conference attendees and radio amateurs who are here in various professional capacities. We did so again this year, providing an island of stability in the boom-to-bust environment.
Still, a few companies were able to find room in their budgets to give away promotional items to delegates, including a couple of very nice, practical gifts. For our part, the IARU is distributing a unique but inexpensive WRC-03 lapel pin featuring the IARU diamond set against an Alpine landscape. We have been producing pins of this kind for many years and some delegates have amassed quite a collection. We are also distributing two different kinds of booklets in three languages, English, French and Spanish. The first contains the conference agenda with relevant resolutions and recommendations in a pocket-sized format that delegates find very useful. The second is a 24-page, full-color explanation of the spectrum requirements of the Amateur Service at 7 MHz.
The conference agenda contains 48 separate items, some of them quite important to future telecommunications development. You may well wonder whether the concerns of the amateur and amateur-satellite services are taken seriously in such a context. The answer is an unequivocal yes. In large part this is because the IARU and its member-societies, working with their respective administrations as well as with the regional telecommunications organizations, have amassed a decades-long record of conducting ourselves at least as professionally as any other interest group. Several of our representatives have been involved in ITU affairs for more than 25 years, including the past Director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, Bob Jones, VE7RWJ, who is serving as a consultant to the IARU at the conference.
One minor agenda item of interest to amateurs was settled early. Revisions to Article 19 of the international Radio Regulations to provide greater flexibility for administrations to assign call signs to amateur stations were among the first decisions to make their way through first reading in the Plenary, which is the final authority at the conference. Administrations will be able to assign amateur stations call signs with suffixes containing up to four characters, the last of which shall be a letter, following the national identifier and the single numeral (the "call area" in the United States and some other countries) specified in the Radio Regulations. There is also a provision for even more than four characters on special occasions, for temporary use. The IARU team was relieved that this issue was resolved early and without using up too many conference resources, which are very limited owing to a budget crisis at the ITU that is related to the sorry state of the telecommunications industry.
While it is part of the larger issue of a complete revision of Article 25 that remains unsettled at this writing, there appears to be agreement among administrations on the elimination of the Morse code as a licensing requirement for HF. It is clear that the outcome will be to leave it to administrations' discretion whether or not to have a Morse receiving and sending requirement. The Morse code will not automatically be dropped from amateur examinations, but there is no doubt that in the next couple of years many administrations will consider doing so.
And what can we say about 40 meters? It has been among the most contentious issues of the conference. With regard to resolving the incompatibility between the amateur and broadcasting services there are three basic schools of thought. One wants to separate them completely over a sufficiently long period of time to ease the transition for broadcasters, with a bit of sharing between the amateur, fixed and mobile services to compensate for some of the impact caused by shifting the broadcasters upward in frequency into a fixed service band. The second wants no changes at all, believing that the benefits are not worth the disruption that would be caused. The third favors a middle ground, eliminating some but not all of the amateur/broadcasting overlap and expanding the amateur band in Regions 1 and 3 (outside the Americas) by 100 kHz over a long period of time. There are only a few days left for the differences to be resolved.
How will
things turn out? As I write this, no one knows. By the time you read this, it
will be common knowledge. We hope to have the full story in next month's QST--and
we hope it has a happy ending!
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