[CQ-Contest] anti-contest petition MMSN

[Tom Frenaye]

see comments below

At 08:57 PM 12/10/2009, VR2BrettGraham wrote:
><snip>
>
>>I think that the contesting community should collectively send a
>>message to ARRL that the league will lose members if they bow to the
>>anti-contesting interests.
>>
>>After all, a lot of contesters are ARRL members, and if the ARRL gets
>>a hint that they will lose support, lose members and in turn lose
>>money and eventually lose relevance, they will look after OUR
>>interests first.
>>
>>Otherwise we are giving them a free pass to get whatever they want.
>>Today it is 10kc for the MMSN, tomorrow, who knows?
>
>Too late.  The CoAs have been blessed by all three Regions & IARU
>AC in its recent meeting noted this.  The damage is done.
>
>The IARU bus by its own admission is driven by ARRL.  This is what
>_your_ national society wants & has railroaded it globally in classic
>IARU fashion.  That you lot are only seeing this now might suggest
>that the radiosporting constituency has little representation in the
>process of deciding what is done & that maybe something should be
>done about that before they pull the next one on y'all.
>
>It might be noted that these CoAs were _not_ used by amateurs
>involved after the recent Italian & mainland China earthquakes.  In reality,
>as any active amateur knows, turn the big knob & you can find a clear
>frequency.  Frequency assignments are very foreign to the amateur
>service & "our" bringing them upon ourselves is a very significant change.
>For this to work in practice, all amateur activity needs to conform to the
>band plan.  The trend is clear, somebody is determined to tell us all
>where we can operate.
>
>Who knows where these CoAs will go now - VR2's national society has
>already attempted to take them to our telecom authority's spectrum
>advisory committee - to my recollection the first time in >20 years that
>officialdom's attention has been brought to what we do in our HF
>allocations.  As I said in a previous post, scary stuff. Enjoy!
>
>73, ex-VR2BG/p.


While Brett has some strong opinions, I don't think they are all accurate, at least from the information sources I've seen.

The November 2009 IARU Electronic Newsletter, written by IARU Secretary Rod Stafford, W6ROD, has this paragraph:
(the IARU web site does not have their recent newsletters posted)


>There has been a movement in the last several years to try to identify "centers of activity" frequencies across all three IARU regions that can be used in disaster relief operations.  It has at times been difficult to arrive at a consensus on what frequencies should be used.  The AC noted that all three regions have now reached consensus on three global Center of Activity (CoA) frequencies for use in the event of emergencies: 14.300, 18.160 and 21.360 MHz.  When no emergency operations are being conducted, these frequencies are open for normal amateur usage.  However, GAREC-09 (more on GAREC later in this report) calls upon IARU member-societies, among others, “whenever emergency communications are being conducted on frequencies that propagate internationally, to use any available real-time communications channels, including but not limited to e-mail bulletins, web-sites, social networking and DX-clusters to draw the attention of the largest possible number of Amateur Radio opera
tors to on-going emergency communications, in order to avoid interference with emergency traffic.”  It would be helpful for each member-society to develop an effective method of notifying amateurs within their own country of any such emergency traffic being handled on the CoA frequencies, or elsewhere in the amateur bands.

It seems pretty clear that the discussion over 14.300, at least from an IARU perspective, is all about emergency and disaster relief situations, and does not relate at all to daily net activity.    I think most hams will find what they are doing to be reasonable.

I think we've had enough discussion on the 14.300 issue for now - on to the ARRL 10 Meter Contest!

              -- Tom


=====
e-mail: k1ki at arrl.org   ARRL New England Division Director  http://www.arrl.org/
Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444