RadioBanter - View Single Post - Get your Trophy US Extra Callsign (A KH0x call would be nice!)

November 26th 04, 04:22 AM

wrote in
:

On 24 Nov 2004 01:31:47 GMT, Alun wrote:

Quite true, but if you live in Germany and nip down to your local USAF
facility for a VE sesion you can get a US licence, all legal and above
board.

There's an obvious solution. If someone takes a VE test overseas and
has no US address, they ought to be given a sequentially issued call in
one of the less populous FCC districts, say the 1st district.

Or they should be told to buzz off. Why should any U.S. license be
issued to someone in a foreign country that has no intention of using
it in the U.S. ?

And with the CEPT stuff, there's even more reason not to issue U.S.
licenses in many countries.

73, Jim KH2D

The problem with CEPT operation under a foreign call is that non-residence
is a required condition. This means, amongst other things, that having a
green card completely bars operation in the US under CEPT.

However, anyone who has a licence from a country that has an ordinary
bilateral reciprocal agrrement with the US can operate in the US even as a
permanent resident for an indefinite period of time.

In both cases, FCC rules impose further conditions:-

1) They must not be a US citizen;

2) They must be a citizen of the country that issued their licence; and

3) They must not have a US licence.

OTOH, the rules for obtaining a regular US licence leave it open to anyone
except a representative of a foreign government. This is supposed to be so
that listening stations can separate diplomats from other hams by their
non-US calls. This exception seems to be allowable because of an overriding
government interest.

What would you have the FCC do differently?

It doesn't seem likely that you could get back to the situation where
foreign hams in general couldn't get a US call, as this would likely not
make it past the due process clause.

If you could acheive that I'd still be OK, as I could use W3/my UK call
forever if I didn't have a US call. Others wouldn't be so lucky. If they
came from a country with no bilateral agreement (remember CEPT is no help
to US residents), or if they were citizens of one country with a licence
from another, or even if they just got into the hobby after coming to live
in the US, those guys would all be QRT. That's how it used to be in the bad
old days.

So maybe you'd like to ban VE tests held outside the US? That would be hard
on your military. How do you get licenced if you are posted somewhere that
you don't speak the language? Well, one way is to get a licence from your
own country by taking a test in your own language, and then get reciprocal
privileges. Granted, I can't think of other examples of countries offering
testing outside their borders, but not many have a VE system either. I
think VK does. I wonder if you can take their tests outside VK?

Another suggestion I saw in this thread was to stop aliens from being VEs.
I don't think that would fly constitutionally speaking either. BTW, I'm a
VE myself. I don't think it would harm me that much if I couldn't be a VE.
You could volunteer to explain that to any Americans that might want to
take a test but couldn't because we could only muster 2 VEs that day.

Perhaps it would be possible to tinker with the rules only for VE tests
held outside the US, restricting the nationality of either the VEs and/or
the candidates. OTOH, it's possible that if you did that you might run
afoul of the civil rights laws of the host countries.

So, what do you seriously suggest?

I don't really think anyone cares if someone in Japan can get a call that
belongs to the mainland US. All that really seems to be needed is some way
to prevent those testing overseas from getting an exotic offshore US call.
Arguably, those in the mainland US shouldn't be able to either, but the FCC
doesn't regard this as important.