Good news, bad news.
First the good news: The FCC has corrected the problems with
the ULS and resumed the issuing of ham tickets.
The bad news. All calls issued when the system was messed up
were set aside and news calls issued.

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The FCC is back in the business of issuing Amateur Service license
grants after a shutdown of several days. The Commission's Wireless
Telecommunications Bureau (WTB) last week halted processing of Amateur
Service applications after a Universal Licensing System (ULS) computer
programming problem caused application grants to go awry. Besides
creating an application backlog, the glitch resulted in the issuance
of nearly 130 out-of-sequence Group D (2x3) amateur call signs. Those
erroneous grants now have been set aside, and licensees have been
issued new, in-sequence call signs.

"The Commission appears to have corrected the earlier erroneous call
sign assignments," reports ARRL Volunteer Examiner Coordinator Manager
Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, who's been closely monitoring the situation. "In
the past 24 hours, the FCC has issued 1915 Amateur Service grants,
some of which were corrections for the earlier call sign anomalies."
Jahnke says the rest of the grants represented the application backlog
and an initial run of some 600 applications for license renewal,
license modification, vanity call signs and administrative updates the
WTB ran November 10 to check out the system.

WTB personnel auditing the results of that initial run apparently were
satisfied that the trouble wouldn't resurface and removed an "alert"
posted on the ULS Web site five days earlier to announce the
suspension of Amateur Service grants. The FCC is closed for Veterans'
Day, November 11--a federal holiday--and no additional applications
will be processed until November 12.

Jahnke says that each of the 130 or so licensees issued
out-of-sequence call signs will get a set-aside letter from the FCC
via Certified Mail, pointing out the assignment error and listing the
corrected call sign. The problem seems to have affected only new 2x3
call sign grants.

The 130 affected licensees can learn their new call signs by searching
the ULS database by licensee name or by FCC Registration Number (FRN),
if they know it. Web call sign servers may not yet reflect the newest
ULS call sign grants. Records of the erroneous call sign grants will
be maintained in the ULS archive.

The difficulties began in late October, when a ULS software change
shunted all amateur applications from the nation's VECs into "Pending
2" status and flagged them for manual review without any
justification. Attempts to correct the error only seemed to make
things worse, however.

After regrouping, the WTB thought it had things under control by
November 2, and it reprocessed all the applications in the queue. That
time, the system not only failed to grant some routine requests for
new sequential call signs but erroneously began issuing
out-of-sequence Group D call signs from brand-new call sign blocks in
several districts. At that point, the WTB stopped amateur processing
altogether.

While the first and third call districts were unaffected, the system
jumped from issuing call signs in the KC2Nxx sequence to the WQ2Axx
sequence, Jahnke said. It also had assigned WQ4xxx, WQ5xxx, WQ7xxx and
WQ9xxx call signs. In the eighth district, there was a gap between
KD8xxx to KM8xxx call signs, while in the tenth district the
Commission went from KC0Txx to WI0Axx. In the sixth district, the
sequence shifted from KG6Wxx to KI6Axx.

Despite the processing error, Jahnke emphasized, the anomalous Group D
call sign grants were legal to use on the air.

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What gets me is that a previous poster was right: Why
couldn't the FCC just leave the otherwise legal calls alone. They
weren't harming anything and is a waste of taxpayer dollars. I really
don't think Riley would have cared one bit anyway, as the issued calls
were otherwise legal. Dumkoffs!


--
Dan, KD8AGU
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