Topband: Bnad Plans

[Rick Warnett]

Boy am I glad I live in P29 where band plans don't even exist. Our regulatory
body has a hard time managing commercial allocations and with the few ops there
are here on "normal" HF bands we never have this problem of overcrowding.
Even in VK, there are SSB nets and long long ragchews on 1812, something it
sounds like would be a capital offence in USA or EU. We have someone here
downunder who "owns" 1825 CW and operates over any voice station that encroaches
his turf, so it's not all one sided.

As an avid 50MHz operator I recall the past vitrolic comments passed around re
the exclusive CW band being extended to 50.150, 50.200 or some other arbitary
figure. It never happened, because there are too many countries with different
regs and adminstrations who don't see the problems as being important.
If the FCC is so worried about amateur transmissions - whoaaa there, you guys
have real problems.

Maybe the comments about the FCC hearing DELIBERATE interference are a lot more
relevant than everyone seems to be thinking or saying  !
That's a whole different ballgame gents !

In Aussie, the amateurs are supposed to be self regulating, we even manage most
of the time here in P29, more than a few illegals have had their gear
confiscated and been fined for strait out illegal ops.
Maybe self regulation as applied to band plans is not a seriously real concept,
but you ought to be able to work something out for the benefit of all.

If CW is such an advantageous mode with it's narrow band operation and immunity
to interference, then it should have proportionally less of the band. People
talking about handing 70Khz exclusively to a mode that can operate with 10% of a
voice modes bandwidth are being VERY GENEROUS.

You guys are lucky enough to have 200KHz anyway, surely 20-25KHz of exclusive CW
should be enough if it so much better ?

And what happens if a real DX station is operating SSB on 1815 - do you call ?
It would sure hurt a lot to just tune on past and ignore them !

50MHz works pretty well with gentlemans rules, are they still applicable on 160
?

Cheers from DXland

Rick