FCC back in the business after computer hiccup

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) halted processing of Amateur Service applications November 5 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," ARRL Volunteer Examiner Coordinator Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, said November 11. "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 did 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 the "alert" posted on the ULS Web site five days earlier to announce the suspension of Amateur Service grants.

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. 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.

Despite the processing error, Jahnke emphasized, the anomalous Group D call sign grants, which included numerous WQ-prefixes, were legal to use on the air.

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

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