Personally, I don’t see what the big fuss is about. I suppose allowing employees to do this might set a bad precedent, but it’s clear that this exception is being made only for emergency drills…….Dan
QST de W1AW
ARRL Bulletin 14 ARLB014
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington CT April 26, 2010
To all radio amateurs
SB QST ARL ARLB014
ARLB014 FCC Seeks Comments on Newly Proposed Rules for Amateur Radio Operators and Emergency Drills
In March, the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposed to amend the Part 97 rules governing the Amateur Radio Service. The new rules would provide that, under certain limited conditions, Amateur Radio operators may transmit messages during emergency and disaster preparedness drills, regardless of whether the operators are employees of entities participating in the drill.
On April 22, a summary of the NPRM was published in the Federal Register and the FCC is seeking comments on it. Comments must be filed on or before May 24, 2010 (30 days after publication in the Federal Register); reply comments must be filed on or before June 7, 2010 (45 days after publication in the Federal Register).
Instructions on how to file comments are listed beginning on page 5 of the NPRM. The NPRM is available on the web in PDF format.
NNNN
/EX
Jon says
We REALLY need to get the rules out of the way so we can do our magic…
David Brodbeck N8SRE says
I agree that this particular rule change is harmless. I do think we should be careful, though, that this role stays limited. I think if public service agencies get the idea that the amateur bands can be an easy solution to their radio interoperability problems, we won’t keep our primary allocations for long. It’s understandably hard for politicians to say “no” to police and firefighters.