Amateur LCD amended

The Wireless Institute of Australia reports that the country's regulator, the ACMA, has amended the Amateur LCD) and the Overseas Amateurs Visiting Australia Class Licence.

• WRC -07 allocated the band 135.7 – 137.8 kHz to amateurs on a secondary basis, but to date Advanced licensees have been able to operate on this band only if they had obtained a variation of their licence conditions.

Now all Advanced amateurs may operate on that band subject to conditions including the condition that a radiated power of more than 1 watt EIRP cannot be used.

• A worry for D-Star users and other digital modes was the requirement to use either a tone burst system that has a frequency of 1750 Hz, or a continuous tone coded squelch system or a dual tone multi frequency system if the output
of the repeater was on a frequency different from the input frequency.

Now any other readily available code or signal is equally acceptable.

• Many visiting amateurs were bemused by the requirement that if visiting Australia they had to give their callsign followed by the suffix VK, the opposite of the order used everywhere else.

Now the class licence has been varied and an amateur visiting Australia now must use his callsign preceded by the letters VK.

These changes were first requested by the WIA in December 2008.

There a number of other changes, mainly reflecting current drafting practises and also requiring amateurs not to communicate with amateurs in a foreign country if that would be inconsistent with the Australian spectrum plan.
That rather obscure provision is really substituting the spectrum plan, which is always accessible on the ACMA website for a notice in the Commonwealth Gazette.

The WIA welcomes the changes.

Wireless Institute of Australia

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