There may be a Santa Claus, after all! Great job by Paul and Chris. Jim Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director ARRL Great Lakes Division 5065 Bethany Rd. Mason, OH 45040 E-mail: <mailto:k8je@arrl.org> k8je@arrl.org; Tel.: 513-459-0142 ARRL - The Reason Amateur Radio Is! Members - The Reason ARRL Is! -----Original Message----- From: Joel Harrison [mailto:w5zn@arrl.org] Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 11:17 AM To: arrl-odv Subject: 5 MHz Greetings, You will recall Paul Rinaldo, with assistance from Chris Imlay, has been doing great work with the various government agencies which have a hand in spectrum usage at 5 MHz to gain increased privileges for the Amateur Radio Service in that segment. While things have been moving very slow (as usual with these things) recent progress has been made. The Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee (IRAC) has agreed to our requests (of sometime ago) for the following: 1. Replacing the frequency 5368.0 kHz with 5358.5 kHz because monitoring of 5368.0 kHz show it to be heavily utilized by government services; 2. Allowing CW and possibly other narrow-band digital modes. 3. Allowing a power increase from 50 watts to 100 watts ERP, provided that amateurs utilize Voice-Operated Transmit (VOX) while in the single sideband emission mode, to permit the amateur operator to hear an attempt by another station, which may be a Federal user, to utilize the channel. What SHOULD (and I emphasize should) happen next is NTIA will draft a letter to the FCC recommending the change. There is a chance that such a letter will be drafted before the next IRAC meeting on January 8. In the meantime, agencies with any additional concerns have been requested to chime in, and so far there haven't been any. Do not publicize this yet, repeat do NOT publicize this yet as we're still in a wait and see situation here and something could still happen to derail it, but I wanted to keep the board up to date on this matter as progress is being made. There will be plenty of time to publicize it AFTER (if) it becomes effective. That hasn't happened yet and will only happen after the FCC officially permits it. Thanks for Paul and Chris for their work so far in keeping this in front of the various agencies responsible for making these increased privileges happen. 73 Joel W5ZN