US vanity callsign fee to rise

The regulatory fee to apply for an Amateur Radio vanity call sign will go up slightly later this year, an FCC Order indicates.

A Report and Order and Order On Reconsideration (R&O) in the assessment and collection of regulatory fees for fiscal years 2004 and 2005 released July 7 increases the fee for FY 2005 to $21.90 for the 10-year license term. The FCC said it had adjusted FY 2004 "payment units" for each service to better reflect expected FY 2005 payment liabilities.

"We tied to obtain verification for these estimates from multiple sources and, in all cases, we compared FY 2005 estimates with actual FY 2004 payment units to ensure that our revised estimates were reasonable," the FCC said in the R&O. "Where appropriate, we adjusted and/or rounded our final estimates to take into consideration the fact that certain variables that impact on the number of payment units cannot be estimated exactly."

In a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the roceeding last February, the Commission had proposed keeping the vanity call sign fee at its current $20.80. The fee rose from $16.30 to $20.80 last August. A reevaluation in the number of anticipated vanity call sign applications - or "payment
units" - accounts for the latest fee hike.

In its February 2005 NPRM, the Commission had estimated it would receive 8000 vanity applications during FY 2005. This month's R&O reflects a downward recalculation to an anticipated 7600 vanity applications - up only slightly from a year earlier - so the fee had to be raised to meet FY 2005
revenue requirements.

While the R&O does not specify the effective date of the change, this generally occurs 30 days after the R&O's publication in The Federal Register, which hasn't happened yet. In past years, the effective date has been in August or September.

More information on vanity call signs is available on the ARRL Web site http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/vanity.html.

Source: ARRL Letter - courtesy of The American Radio Relay League

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