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Copyright © 1996 by Virtual Publishing Company
As reported in our June opinion piece, as you've read in the July 1996 issue of QST, and as you have certainly seen in various online newsgroups and forums, there are definite concerns with frequency allocations to the Amateur Radio Service. In particular, as an economic value has been assigned to spectrum, many politicians believe all spectrum should be auctioned and treated like real estate: You buy what you can afford and put to use. Times have changed and Amateur Radio needs to roll with the punches. Sticking our heads in the ground and pretending that everything is as it always has been is not a good strategy. We are in a new era.
Amateurs are necessarily concerned as to how they fit in to an allocation process that measures value solely in terms of how much someone is willing to pay for the spectrum. Of interest, and apparently lost in recent online discussions, is that the FCC itself may understand that auctioning away the ham radio spectrum is the wrong action. You can read this for yourself in this transcript from the March 1996 En Banc Hearing on Spectrum Management.
We will continue to write on this topic throughout the summer months. We will do our best to write in a factual way and to highlight that all is not gloom and doom. Amateur Radio will prosper and become the hobby of the 21st Century!
We encourage you to write a letter to the FCC as described in the QST July Editorial, or reprinted in Ham Radio Online (Urgent Message from ARRL HQ). In just 4 weeks, over 2,000 of you read this article at Ham Radio Online!
And now, here is the transcript of the FCC hearing on future spectrum policy issues that specifically concerns Amateur Radio:
"MR. HATFIELD: Yes. To keep my answer short, generally I think the presumption should be in favor of auctions. There are -- in shorthand, the two times that it would apply is when there is exclusive rights for the exclusive use, which we've already talked about, it should apply there; and, secondly, if there is no overriding social issues or, in particular, there is no marketplace failure.
And the example that I would give of that if one group we have not heard here is amateur radio operators, for example, and it seems to me -- and I'm a ham, I confess -- and it would seem to be very hard to aggregate funds from enough hams to be able to buy spectrum, and yet I would argue that there is a large social benefit from having kids being able to experiment with radio as I did when I was 13 or 14 years old.
COMMISSIONER NESS: So you would not auction the ham spectrum.
MR. HATFIELD: Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly.
COMMISSIONER NESS: I'd have a hard time with Dave Sidell on my staff, who is also a ham radio --
MR. HATFIELD: Yeah. Right, right. No, I didn't talk with him advance. But that's sort of an extreme example, but that's very clearly where there is a marketplace failure. You wouldn't capture, because of the transaction costs, you wouldn't be able to capture the full value to society of that spectrum.
COMMISSIONER NESS: Wayne, would you agree that we ought not to auction the ham radio spectrum? You were smiling at that point.
MR. PERRY: Yeah. There are things that obviously -- you have a public policy obligation, and you need to set the parameters of what these services are going to be used for, and then I think the auctions are the most efficient way of providing the service.
COMMISSIONER NESS: Okay. So, in other words, we ought to do an allocation, --
MR. PERRY: Yes.
COMMISSIONER NESS: -- and the allocation ought to be based on more than just simply a marketplace determination based on auction.
MR. PERRY: I believe that's the appropriate."
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