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Four Metre Band and OFCOM rubbish decisions?
2 April 2015 | by There was an announcement on the RSGB and OFCOM sites advising some UK full licence holders that 70.5 to 71.5MHz is being made available for one year by special permission for further digital experiments, a bit like 146-147MHz here in the UK.
Sorry, but has OFCOM gone stark raving mad???
I can see no good justification for this 1MHz of spectrum. 2m was already under-used and the 146-147MHz allocation is probably being used by a tiny handful of people from time to time only. DATV tests could quite as easily happen at 70cms.
I can think of far better parts of the spectrum OFCOM could have allocated e.g 100kHz around 40MHz (for Es propagation experiments), 73kHz, below 8.3kHz and a contiguous 5MHz allocation. Oh no, these require a brain to be engaged by OFCOM people.
Maybe this is an April fool’s wind-up, although I suspect it is true.
Surely if OFCOM wants to further real experimentation in radio science there are better ways of going about it? Yet again, I am totally unimpressed. Between OFCOM and the RSGB, I think this is, yet again, a stupid stupid decision. So we now have 2MHz of extra spectrum for 12 months that a very few might use. Big deal. OFCOM, engage brains, think radio science. If you want to help grow future engineers that we so badly need, these allocations will not help at all. Think again!
See http://www.rsgb.org/ .
See http://www.70mhz.org/ .
One Response to “Four Metre Band and OFCOM rubbish decisions?”
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None of my equipment can transmit on 146-147Mhz and similarly my 4 metre equipment is FM only covering up to 70.487 Mhz so these time limited opportunities are of no use or interest to me whatsoever. I would rather Ofcom spent time and common sense explaining the expiry date of the new licence properly. I emailed them and was told my licence needs renewing before March 29th 2020. Why this date when the new licence expires April 7th 2020 and if indeed the expiry date is supposed to be related to the previous licence (which in my case is due to be renewed by September 27th 2015) have this come up with this date?