On Apr 21, 11:09�am, wrote:
On Apr 21, 2:45 am, Larry wrote:

wrote in news:1177105498.800186.298520
@y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

Our service will only continue to exist so long as the majority of the
worlds national governments believe that we bring value to the public
in exchange for the incredibly valuable RF spectrum that is entrusted
to our use.

That might have been true before 2000, but isn't true today. *Some
spectrum would be lost to services who are interested in VHF/UHF and
above. *But, noone wants HF any more, as is self evident by the lack of
traffic across HF outside the ham bands.

MF/HF is only a minor fraction of our allocations. *

In terms of how many kHz we have, yes. Except for 6 meters has more
kHz than all of the 9 MF/HF bands plus the channels at 60 meters. Same
for almost every amateur allocation above 30 MHz.

But for some reason those HF/MF bands are considered extremely
desirable by radio amateurs.


Maybe it's not
vulnerable, or maybe it is, but compared to the massive amount of VHF/
UHF spectrum we could lose, I consider HF an insignificant issue.

Which would you rather lose - 1 MHz of the 1296 MHz band, or all of
160, 40, 20, 30 and 17 meter bands? Same amount of bandwidth...

So I pose my question again..... *"What are we going to do about
that?"

The first thing is to simply *use* that spectrum. The very best
argument for reassignment of spectrum is that the folks who have it
aren't using it. or aren't using much of it. That argument was one
reason we lost 220-222 MHz: the folks who wanted it were able to
convince FCC that we hams could fit all of our 220-222 activities into
222-225.

But you can't force amateurs to operate on certain bands. They can be
encouraged, but not forced. So the question becomes "what will make
the VHF/UHF amateur bands more attractive to hams?"

Perhaps a new generation of near-geosynchronous amateur satellites
would attract more activity. Or the deployment of a highspeed linked
repeater network. But those things require sizable infrastructure
investments by amateurs.

---

Perhaps, when we speak of those VHF/UHF bands, we're seeing history
repeat itself.

In 1912, amateurs were legislated to "200 Meters And Down", meaning
they were legislated off what were then considered to be the most-
useful wavelengths. After the 1912 laws went into effect, amateurs
could get station licenses for any of the 'shortwaves' simply for the
asking.

But once those amateurs showed how useful those 'shortwaves' were,
others followed, and by 1924 or so amateurs were confined to certain
bands. No longer could amateurs simply pick a wave and get a license
to use it.

Then in 1927 came the "1929 rules", which significantly narrowed some
of the existing bands. 40 meters had been 7000 - 8000 kHz before the
1929 rules, but once they went into effect, the band was 7000 - 7300.
20 meters went from 14000 - 16000 to 14000 - 14400. There were other
changes such as requiring stable and clean signals.

Some said that those 1929 rules would strangle amateur radio, and
would soon kill it off due to overcrowding and the expense/complexity
of a "1929 transmitter". But exactly the opposite happened, because in
the years after the 1929 rules, the number of US hams almost tripled
and the technology used took great leaps forward.

We hams got our enormous VHF/UHF allocations after WW2, when much of
it was considered relatively useless, or at least not as useful as the
lower frequencies. That's all changed in the past couple of decades.

Perhaps it's 1929 all over again in some ways.

73 de Jim, N2EY