Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Lifetime Amatuer License Proposal

FCC Seeks Comments on Petition to Grant Lifetime Amateur Radio Licenses:
"The FCC is seeking comments on a Petition for Rule Making (RM 11760) that asks the FCC to grant lifetime Amateur Radio licenses. Mark F. Krotz, N7MK, of Mesa, Arizona, filed his request with the FCC last November. He wants the FCC to revise § 97.25 of its rules to indicate that Amateur Radio licenses are granted for the holder’s lifetime, instead of for the current 10 year term."

3 comments:

  1. Not a good idea. How do they know a ham has died? Already there are inactive/sk calls in the database. All it will do is further clog the database

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  2. Yes, and at the very least it creates a reason for people to update their addresses every once in a while.

    (How is the FCC supposed to contact you if your address is 30 years old and you never updated it?).

    I'm up for renewal this year, btw, and frankly I think they ought to make us re-test! There's a lot of stuff that has changed since 2006 and 1996, and I am probably not half-as-competent as I ought to be.

    - - -

    Off-topic, I am exploring the wonderful world of FCC type-acceptance databases.

    The reason is, I want to monitor progress on Type 90 acceptance of the long-awaited Shi Ying SR-224, formerly the Anytone AT-5888UV III (tri-band version of the Anytone 5888UV mobile).

    I really don't want to buy until I know this isn't going to be vaporware.

    Rather than bugging Ed Griffin with questions, or waiting on him and (whatever staff he has) to update his website, I figured that you can go to the Part 90 certification database instead, which I assume the FCC updates at least once every few days.

    https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm

    The FCC Grantee would be Import Communications, the code for which is "2AG9V".

    I don't see anything listed yet, although that agrees with the e-mail Ed sent me this weekend that they were still waiting for the wheels to turn at the FCC.

    Does anyone know of any better way of keeping tabs on the Commission's progress? There is a lookup for pending applications, but it requires the input of some non-public information, like the (unpublished) FCC ID of the device (which I assume will be something like 2AG9V-SR224, but don't know for sure) as well as a confirmation number that probably only Ed knows.

    Toodles,

    Gwen
    AD5NL

    P.S. Ed seems like a very responsive guy who wants to sell good radios, and I admire that.

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  3. BTW I got the link for the Part 90 database above from Miklor's site.

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