FCC's Bill Cross: "Behave Yourselves!"

[ARRL]

Bill Cross, W3TN, a staff member in the FCC's Mobility Division, and Laura Smith, FCC Special Counsel for Amateur Enforcement, spoke at the FCC Forum on Saturday, May 16 at the 2009 Dayton Hamvention®. Cross opened by explaining just where Amateur Radio falls in the FCC's bureaucracy: "In the Mobility Division [part of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau], we handle the day-to-day administration of the Amateur Service and some of the rulemaking activities that affect Amateur Radio. The Division also has staff members in our Gettysburg, Pennsylvania office. Our Gettysburg staff handles most of your applications and the licensing matters and deals with the Universal Licensing System, or ULS."



More...

 

[Wire Weasel]

Down here in these parts, some of the older wiser radio guys

and I'm not one of them, have a saying

and it goes like this: "Screw You FCC"


















this message brought to by the committee to promote "screw you fcc" and does not necessarily represent the opinion of any management types anywhere

 

[C2]

All it takes is an allocation proceeding with the FCC, and your spectrum is gone. And you will be left whining about it in Internet chat rooms.

Nice setting of context...

'If you get this message to a friend of mine who's on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere, I'll pay your light bill.' Or, 'Get this message to someplace and I'll buy you a new radio.' That's indirect compensation.

That sounds like DIRECT compensation to me?

The first type of RFI complaint I get are the ones where your neighbors are complaining about you. You guys are causing interference to their television or to their radios or their telephone. The Commission generally tells them if you are a licensed amateur operator operating in the parameters of your license, then the Part 15 device that you are causing interference to is subject to that interference, and the rules state that very clearly. We suggest that they either work with you or they get a filter; those are the two suggestions.

Bravo!

Smith , in cooperation with the ARRL Lab, also handles utility line interference complaints. "This one, you would think, would be easy to resolve -- the power line is causing interference, the utility will come out and fix it and everything will be fine. Not quite so easy," she explained. "Those of you that have been experiencing it for 3, 4, 5, 10, 12 years know that in fact, that is not what happens. What I am discovering is that the utilities quite simply don't know how to fix the problem. They can't identify the noise. What they will do is they will go out and will find 15 sources of noise. They will fix these 15 sources of noise and then they will come back to me with this detailed list of these 15 sources of noise that they have fixed. Yea! We're all done. No -- they haven't fixed your noise. So they don't quite understand the concept of 'Don't just run out and fix everything you see, that's irrelevant to the amateur.' The amateur wants you to fix their noise.

Kinda hard to tell them to screw off.

Unless one just wants to be a lawless rebel...

But make no mistake, Smith has a big hammer and she ain't afraid to use it, I'm sure...