Greetings. At the instruction of the Executive Committee, and following helpful edits from Kay Craigie, Dave Sumner, Tom Frenaye, and Ed Hare, we filed today the first of several Ex Parte written submissions in an effort to complete a favorable record in the BPL Docket proceeding. The EC at its last meeting expressed dissatisfaction at the FCC's neglect of this Docket and its failure to fix the defective BPL rules following the Court of Appeals' remand and the FCC's issuance of its Further Notice of Proposed Rule Making. The EC ordered the scheduling of a series of further filings with FCC including an interference complaint involving IBEC BPL systems which are not using full-time notching of Amateur allocations. Recall that it was necessary for ARRL to file a Petition for a Writ of Mandamus just to get the FCC to issue the Further Notice following the Court of Appeals remand.
A copy of the cover pleading and Exhibit A of this voluminous filing are attached for your review. However, there were seven exhibits in all, the last of which is a very persuasive OFCOM report that is quite favorable to our position in this matter. Please don't just read the cover pleading and exhibit A. You will find the remaining Exhibits at the following URL:
As is obvious from reading this, the vast bulk of the work on this was that of Ed Hare. This is in my view one of Ed's finest efforts, and we should be quite satisfied with this filing. Of course, the FCC has been stonewalling us since the beginning in this case and it remains to be seen whether they will ultimately do the "right thing" here and modify the rules to require full time Amateur band notching to notch depths of 35 dB. As I have noted to the EC several times, the favorable results we obtained in the Court of Appeals, and the expenditure of a lot of the members' money in the effort is meaningless unless we are ultimately able to obtain rules which protect the Amateur HF and VHF allocations from BPL interference. The Executive Committee essentially ordered the continuation of the "full court press" on this matter so we are doing that now.
Let me know if you have any questions. There is more coming up soon on the BPL issue, so QRX.
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