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Steve Bonine · **July 23, 2007 ARS License Numbers**

wrote:

What *should* be done, IMHO, is for amateur organizations to do the
legwork up-front. IOW,
I think the way to do a proposal is:
1) Gather up lots of opinions from the amateur community
2) Write a draft proposal
3) Present it to the amateur community, with clear explanation of what
is proposed and why.
4) Gather more opinions by means of surveys, polls, etc.
5) Rework the draft proposal based on the input received
6 Repeat steps 3 through 5 until a proposal gets a clear and
compelling majority of support from the amateur community, and the
opposition's points are dealt with.IOW, build a consensus *first*
7) Submit the proposal to FCC, including the survey/poll results.

I suspect that that's what the ARRL thinks they're doing now.

The problem is that on any issue that's controversial, step 6 is going
to be tough, if not impossible. Think of how hard it is to get a
"compelling majority of support from the amateur community" on the issue
of what the code requirements should be for the various classes of license.

If all that were done, FCC would assign an RM number and then be
flooded with supportive comments. FCC could then easily rubber-stamp
approval of the proposal.

Contentious issues tend to split the amateur radio community into
segments that are unlikely to agree on any single proposal. No matter
what you end up with, there is going to be a significant fraction of the
fraternity that will file negative comments.

For example, I have to wonder whether the regulation by bandwidth
proposal died because the ARRL didn't work hard enough for consensus, or
because the amateur radio community is simply opposed to any regulation
by bandwidth proposal. I honestly don't know; perhaps if ARRL had
worked harder for consensus, there would have been less negative
comments filed.

Then there are the comments from the NON-ham-radio community. BPL, for
example . . . there are plenty of segments that will file comments
against whatever the ARRL might come up with. There's nothing that they
can do about that.

But doing it that way takes a lot of grunt work, time, and effort.
Also takes compromise.

And without the compromise, the work, time, and effort go for naught. I
have not observed that hams, in general, are eager to compromise.

73, Steve KB9X