"Alun L. Palmer" wrote in message
. ..
wrote in
ups.com:
I think after the dust settles the big issue will be grandfathering
Novices
and Advanceds to the next class up, i.e. tidying up the licence scheme.
and
of course I still want more phone on 40, 20 and 15, but it will be a while
before the FCC will get back to these things. Maybe petitions on these
things would be dismissed if they were filed right now, but later on they
might succeed.
As adamant as the FCC has been on this, it's very doubtful that
grandfathering will ever happen. They've made it plain that they consider
it reasonable for people to pass the written tests for the upgrades. In
addition, at the rate the Novice licenses are decreasing they will be all
but gone in less than 10 years anyway.
You may be somewhat right on the phone issue. Actually though I would
expect to see them try the band plan approach (ala Europe) rather than the
regulatory approach. Bad thing here is that it will be a major issue on a
contest day as the contest ops will expand to fill the whole band instead of
just part of the band for any given contest as they do now.
IOW, there are other outstanding issues, but IMHO things are moving in the
right direction.
I do wonder why this took 3 1/2 years. Maybe the large number of petitions
(18) and comments (zillions) had something to do with it. Maybe even Riley
had something to do with delaying it? Does he have that much influence?
73 de N3KIP
I'm firmly convinced that the number of petitions was a major hang-up on
processing this. Each petition had a slightly different spin and each had a
significant number of comments. The FCC staff had to digest all this and
come to an agreement on just what approach would be taken.
Dee, N8UZE