Outstanding news! It will be hard to wait until 2009. Congratulations to Dave and the rest of our team who worked so hard to make this happen. I hope all are having a safe trip home after a successful session. One question, however, that I am cautious to ask. In the agenda for WRC2007, item 1.13, I am not sure what is included in all the highlighted references, but are we going to have to start work now to preserve the Region 2 7200-7300 KHz allocation in 2007? 73, Wade W0EJ david.sumner@ties.itu.int wrote:

History was made today. Never before in the history of radiocommunication has an HF broadcasting band been shifted to accommodate the needs of another service. But that's what happened at WRC-03 this morning during the final working Plenary, which is still going on at this writing. A carefully crafted compromise was approved on first and second reading that calls for broadcasters in Regions 1 and 3 to vacate 7100-7200 kHz on 29 March 2009 and for the band to be allocated to the amateur service from that date forward.

The fact that this was done to accommodate the amateur service has left more than a few other delegates somewhat incredulous.

The only previous case of an HF broadcasting band being relocated or narrowed occurred at WARC-79, when the broadcasting service relinquished 70 kHz of its little-used 26 MHz band. That cost the broadcasters nothing -- they didn't use the band very much, and still don't -- and helped them mask the magnitude of the expansions they were seeking elsewhere at WARC-79.

But we are not gloating, even for a moment. It took the cooperation of broadcasters and many, many others to enable us to bring this home for radio amateurs. The people who worked with us who are not radio amateurs -- including some who were strongly opposed at the start but who acceded to the compromise -- deserve much of the credit.

Attached is what I believe is an accurate, but unofficial, Table (with all footnotes that were changed or added) as adopted this morning. The reason it is unofficial is because there were some edits of the footnotes made during the course of presentation of the document that I have picked up but that are not yet reflected in the official conference documentation.

Again, the main feature is the move of broadcasting out of 7100-7200 kHz in Regions 1 and 3 and the introduction of the amateur service. This provides a worldwide amateur allocation of 200 kHz less than six years from now -- a relatively short period of time for the ITU -- with no change at 7000-7100 kHz and with the existing additional 100 kHz, 7200-7300 kHz, retained by amateurs in Region 2 on an exclusive basis. Thus, the incompatibility between amateur and broadcasting use of the 7-MHz band will be cut in half; the spectrum available to amateurs in Regions 1 and 3 will double; the useful spectrum for Region 2 amateurs at night will double; and we have lost nothing in the process.

This result falls short of our goal of a 300-kHz worldwide, exclusive band for amateurs at 7 MHz. We knew that it would. ITU decisions are made by consensus. Building consensus requires give and take, and we didn't have much to give. The conference could easily have concluded, as did a number of the participants, that the cost to other services of even a partial realignment outweighed the benefits to amateurs.

But somehow, when the dust settled we had gained a significant improvement in the 7-MHz amateur allocation -- and on a reasonable schedule. Dates as far out as 2033 were proposed during the course of negotiations. For comparison purposes, broadcasting expansion agreed at WARC-92 does not take effect until 2007 – 15 years later.

In the Table of Frequency Allocations, 7000-7200 kHz will be exclusively amateur in Regions 1 and 3 (and 7000-7300 kHz in Region 2). By footnote, a number of countries – mostly in Region 3 and the Arab States – have also allocated 7100-7200 kHz to the fixed and mobile services. None are in Region 2 or in Europe.

The story of how this all came about will be fun to write, but it’s not one that I should try to tell in my current sleep-deprived state.

“Good” ITU compromises – and virtually every decision made here is a compromise -- are sometimes described as leaving everyone equally unhappy. Your Geneva team is tired, and pretty happy.

73, Dave Sumner, K1ZZ

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