N2WN asked:
>Has WAE or any contest organization penalized folks for not
>following the IARU band plans?
>
>Has there ever been any penalties levied against a contester by any
>official IARU organization?
I believe only this year's WAE contests that the new rule adding the
IARU R1 band plan has applied, so we have yet to see what is done
about violations of the rule.
The second question I think is a manifestation of the widespread lack
of understanding of what IARU is.
Other than CQ, other contests I believe are mostly sponsored by
IARU member societies. As IARU member societies, they have
embraced its Constitution & are expected to generally follow what the
IARU collectively decides on the subject at hand.
Non-combatant amateurs get upset that contests have "taken over"
the bands, so they complain to their member societies who go to
IARU, where they then comes up with band plans with "contest
preferred" segments. Since none of this is really binding on anybody,
things don't change (and in reality can't as boundary conditions like
major contests just can't be planned for) - but because some people
think that what IARU decides is something everybody has to follow, the
non-combatants continue to complain about how contests monopolize
the bands.
So now we see member societies bringing to IARU further papers on
the subject - in this particular case, the same member society as the
one behind the WAE contest (perhaps the first "major" event to adopt
these contest-preferred segments in its rules). The way things are going,
the DARCs, ARRLs & RSGBs of the world are likely to bring upon
themselves further pressure to specify frequencies for contests & to
enforce them.
The worry here for us all is how IARU works - or more precisely, how
it _doesn't_ work. In terms of sheer numbers, non-combatants are
certainly the majority, but when it comes to actually operating (based
on I would imagine any metric one could come up with), they are a
minority. Sadly, you don't see member societies putting forward
anything but this minority view. Yet they sponsor these events & if
I'm not mistaken, one of the drivers for doing so is that the activity
they generate helps establish that the amateur service is using the
increasingly rare-as-hen's-teeth spectrum allocated to us.
IARU itself now recognizes it is broken, see this presentation by now
IARU president VE6SH at the R3 conference in Bangalore:
http://www.iaru-r3.org/13r3c/docs/049a.ppt
To my knowledge, only one IARU member society has attempted to
raise the matter of IARU band plans going too far - the paper was
adopted by the R3 Bangalore conference but in the strange way IARU
works, the Regional organization's Directors ignored its members &
nothing became of it. See: http://www.iaru-r3.org/13r3c/docs/071.doc
In typical IARU fashion, what has been decided at the recent R3
conference has yet to be made public, but R1's band plan mentality
is likely to have been made global as it was decided that R3 should
embrace the operating ethics paper that recently came out of R1 &
has since been adopted by R2. Whether it be adopting a specification
for S-meters or band plans without any words of tolerance - complete
with its Monitoring System reporting band plan "violations" (ignoring
IARU's own terms of reference for MS as a whole) - what R1 gets up to
should be a concern for us all.
73, ex-VR2BG/p.
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