Daryl and members of the list—

Amateur radio plays a daily part in many different types of wireless communications.

Many public safety communications officials (APCO) members are hams and got their start in two-way radio

Many organizations such as the Radio Club of America are made up of 50% or more hams

Many commercial (cellular) engineers and technicians are hams

Many of those who develop next generation two-way radio products for Motorola, Harris, Icom, Kenwood and others are Hams

Ham radio serves as a gateway for many people and they go on to contribute to commercial and land mobile radio

Over the years, technologies pioneered by hams have gone on to become important contributions to the land mobile radio industry

Hams NEED to stay abreast of what is happening in the commercial and land mobile radio worlds—if we bury our heads in the sand that we won’t be prepared to defend our spectrum and/or continue to contribute to the profession

For my part—

I started my career in commercial communications as a result of becoming a licensed ham radio operator in 1962

When I worked for RCA, GE, and Motorola communications companies as a sales engineer my being a ham opened many doors with communications directors in many cities and Counties and gave me a decided advantage of very competition

Today I serve on several national committees—one for APCO, as vice-chair of the broadband committee, and one for the FCC as a part of the Public Safety Advisory Council for their ERIC (Emergency Interoperability center.

Both of these committees have several ham radio operators on them and this gives us a common bond when working together.

If it were not for ham radio I would never have gotten to this point in my life—it changed my idea of what I wanted to become and do for a living, Ham radio is a daily part of my life and to ignore the aspects of radio communications which do not seem relevant to the hobby is not advisable.

For example, the speaker at the next Club meeting is, I am sure, going to discuss the threat to the 420-440 MHz hand band by a bill that is currently in Congress. But I doubt that he will address the following issues:

1) The current administration and FCC believe that narrowband communications is OLD technology and that only broadband is important going forward—never find the fact that no broadband technology supports ANY type of simplex communications, and most don’t support one-to-many communications

2) In order to repurpose spectrum for broadband the FCC must FIND spectrum which is contagious. Most Land mobile radio systems  are intermingled with each other—that is the police and fire channels co-exist with plumbers, trucking companies, taxi companies and others, so taking this spectrum back and converting it to broadband is not a very viable option. HOWEVER, HAMS do operate on contiguous spectrum   in both the 144-148 and 420-450 bands. This makes it easy for the FCC to recommend that this spectrum be repurposed for commercial broadband systems. AND in the 420-450 bands hams are secondary to NTIA which controls the government spectrum and which has been ordered to work with the FCC to identify spectrum which can be repurposed for broadband use.

3) The section of this bill, HR607 that deals with the spectrum give back was crafted my ME—simply because the original bill wanted to take back 144-174 AND 450-512 MHz for broadband use. We have exactly 15 minutes to write this portion of the bill on the day it was introduced and so I came up with this compromise AND added some conditions which would insure this will never happen. The next two paragraphs of the bill deal with how and when the spectrum would be given back and it is virtually impossible for this to happen.

a. The REASON this was put into the bill is that the bills need to be “scored” in order for it to make to the floor of the House—the higher the score the more importance the will have—AND once the scoring is done there will be many amendments to the bill.

b. I have attached my slides which I will be presenting on Sat to a group in Ventura FYI.

In Closing let me say that Ham radio is the foundation for the land mobile and commercial cellular world—AND to focus just on ham radio and NOT be aware of what is happening in the rest of the world of wireless is, to me, short sighted and dangerous.

Andy W6AMS