The first Global Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Conference, GAREC-2005, took place on 13 -- 14 June 2005 in Tampere, Finland. Participants from 17 countries and representatives of all three IARU Regions exchanged and discussed information on the role of radio amateurs in emergency communications.

The major topics were the cooperation between hams and the institutional emergency response providers on national level, and the exchange of experiences from recent events. The presentations made in these sessions will be made available on the web site of the Finnish IARU member society SRAL. The presentations showed how hams support the emergency responders, as skilled volunteer telecommunication operators for the responders' networks as well as by providing their own global networks.

The Conference also discussed ways to improve and facilitate the work of emergency communications networks. It concluded, that the establishment of a "Center of Activity Frequency" for emergency traffic would be desirable. The IARU band plans already include this type of frequencies for a number of activities. Given the fact that the dynamic allocation and use of frequencies within the amateur bands is one of the key elements of the flexibility of this service and thus of its value in disaster situations, such an arrangement appeared as most appropriate and feasible. A respective proposal was formulated, and SRAL, as the host of GAREC-2005, will forward it to IARU for consideration by the next competent regional conferences, the first of these being the Region 1 Conference in Davos, Switzerland, in September 2005.

GAREC-2005 did not make any proposals for actual center of activity frequencies. Such suggestions for actual frequencies will require the careful consideration by those most familiar with band plan matters. In order to be useful for global emergency networks, the frequencies need to be acceptable in all three IARU regions, and frequencies possibly to be considered in Region 1 already this year will need to be reviewed in all three regions. In Region 2 and Region 3 conferences to consider the issue will take place only in the following 2 years.

In a separate statement, the conference summarized the value of the amateur radio services in emergency communications. This statement will be submitted as an input document to the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) taking place in Tunis, Tunisia, November 2005.

The participants of GAREC-2005 appreciated the hospitality of the Finnish hams and of the city of Tampere, this town, whose name has over the year become a synonym for emergency telecommunications. Tampere was the venue of the most decisive events on this subject, from the 1991 experts conference adopting the Tampere Declaration, to the intergovernmental conference ICET-98, adopting in 1998 the Tampere Convention as well as several related conferences on the subject. As a follow-up on the earlier events as well as on GAREC-2005, plans for a conference in 2006 are now under discussion.