Greetings. With thanks to Dave Sumner, Kay Craigie, Jay Bellows and Tom Frenaye for helpful edits, and to the Executive Committee for their quick review and approval, we filed today the attached comments in the FCC's "terminated dockets" proceeding. I mentioned this briefly in oral remarks at the Board Meeting. Quite simply, the FCC has a lot of very old, stale dockets, most of which have either been overtaken by other regulatory actions or acted upon by order but not officially terminated. They are proposing to terminate them, but FCC rules prohibit them from doing so without the consent (or lack of objection) of those involved in the proceeding slated for termination.

 

After careful review of these many dockets (45 of which were in the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, and some of those were ARRL petitions, now no longer relevant) we concluded that the Amateur Service would not be at all prejudiced (with but one exception) if the listed dockets were terminated by FCC. The one exception was an OET docket dealing with the 2300-2305 MHz band. We had in May of 2001 filed a Petition for Rule Making (RM-10165) asking the FCC to upgrade us from Secondary to Primary allocation status. In doing so, we fought off two companies that wanted to make some commercial use of the band. Amateur Radio is a good fit in this  band because we are compatible with the NASA Deep Space Research uses below 2300 MHz. FCC dismissed the petition in 2002 but didn't deal with our arguments on the merits. They simply postponed any consideration of the status of the band.

 

We have asked, in view of other regulatory proceedings that affect the 2300-2305 MHz band, that the Commission not terminate the RM-10165 proceeding, but rather keep it open and address our arguments for a primary allocation on the merits. This filing is not likely to trigger any affirmative consideration of the allocation issue per se, but at least we are signaling that our desire for a primary allocation in this band is still current and of importance to us. This can also be considered a strategy to retain the band in the face of the NBP.

 

A copy is attached.

 

73, Chris W3KD

Christopher D. Imlay
Booth, Freret, Imlay & Tepper. P.C.
14356 Cape May Road
Silver Spring, Maryland 20904-6011
(301) 384-5525 telephone
(301) 384-6384 facsimile
W3KD@ARRL.ORG