Tom asked:
How much will this impact the US position? Do we get a chance to file comments with the FCC in support of (or not) the proposal? Besides our work on the ITU committees, how does the ARRL's position get formally detailed to the FCC?
Tom, the FCC WRC-03 Advisory Committee agreed to draft U.S. proposals on agenda item 1.7.1 last November 15. The text is at http://www.fcc.gov/ib/wrc-03/files/docs/us_proposals/USPL_1_07_1.pdf. This is an industry advisory committee and its output does not automatically become U.S. policy, but in this particular case I know of no reason why the U.S. would not go along. If you compare the documents you will see a lot of similarities, which is not surprising since the starting point for each was the output of the IARU Future of the Amateur Service Committee (FASC) that worked on this in 1996-1998. Dave