Over the peri­od 14th to 25th Novem­ber 2022, the prepara­to­ry work for WRC-23 agen­da item 9.1b con­tin­ued in ITU‑R Work­ing Par­ty 5A (WP5A). Two deliv­er­ables are under discussion:

1) Draft ITU‑R Report M.[AMATEUR_CHARACTERISTICS] – this reports on the spe­cif­ic 23cm band ama­teur and ama­teur satel­lite ser­vice tech­ni­cal para­me­ters and oper­a­tional char­ac­ter­is­tics used in the stud­ies now pub­lished in ITU‑R Report M.2513–0.

2) Draft ITU.R Rec­om­men­da­tion M.[AS_GUIDANCE] – this will rec­om­mend guid­ance that nation­al admin­is­tra­tions can take to facil­i­tate the pro­tec­tion of the radio nav­i­ga­tion satel­lite ser­vice from harm­ful inter­fer­ence from ama­teur radio stations.

Since the pre­vi­ous WP5A meet­ing the IARU glob­al WRC23 9.1b team led by G4SJH has been con­sult­ing with the ama­teur com­mu­ni­ty result­ing in a con­tri­bu­tion to the draft guid­ance rec­om­men­da­tion. As usu­al, the IARU par­tic­i­pat­ed in the meet­ing to sup­port the con­tri­bu­tion and take part in the ongo­ing dis­cus­sion and nego­ti­a­tions. Con­tri­bu­tions were also pro­vid­ed by a num­ber of nation­al admin­is­tra­tions and a sum­ma­ry report of the meet­ing can be downloaded.

In gen­er­al the devel­op­ment of the rec­om­men­da­tion is mov­ing in a suit­able direc­tion and many of the IARU pro­pos­als remain in the draft doc­u­ment that will go for­ward to the next meet­ing for fur­ther work.

Mean­while in CEPT the work in project team SE40 con­tin­ues with their devel­op­ment of an ECC Report on the same coex­is­tence prob­lem and also met dur­ing Novem­ber (3–4^th).

The work on this top­ic will con­tin­ue through­out next year both in ITU‑R and in the region­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions organ­i­sa­tions and the IARU is com­mit­ted to ensure the stud­ies are prop­er­ly inter­pret­ed and that due account is tak­en of the real­i­ties of ama­teur oper­a­tions in this band.

Dur­ing the peri­od 7–13 Sep­tem­ber 2022, the IARU once again par­tic­i­pat­ed in the prepara­to­ry work for WRC-23 agen­da item 9.1b in ITU‑R Work­ing Par­ty 4C (WP4C). The IARU sum­ma­ry report on the WP4C meet­ing can be found here.

Updat­ed stud­ies were pro­vid­ed by France and new stud­ies were con­tributed by the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion (GLONASS), Chi­na (COMPASS) and Japan.

The IARU pro­vid­ed a con­tri­bu­tion pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion agreed in WP5A high­light­ing the low dura­tion of “busy times” for ama­teur activ­i­ties in the 23cm band. This infor­ma­tion was adopt­ed into the draft report. Whilst the stud­ies con­firm the poten­tial for inter­fer­ence to occur into co-fre­quen­cy RNSS receivers in almost the entire band, all the stud­ies have assumed only sta­t­ic sce­nar­ios with­out any con­sid­er­a­tion of the geo­graph­ic dis­tri­b­u­tion and den­si­ty of ama­teur trans­mit­ters or the tem­po­ral aspects of ama­teur or RNSS oper­a­tions. Some stud­ies take account of anten­na pat­terns, but many results and con­clu­sions focus only on worst case main beam con­sid­er­a­tion. The IARU Region 1 has pub­lished a com­men­tary doc­u­ment on these aspects avail­able here.

As a result of these stud­ies and the reg­u­la­to­ry sta­tus of the ama­teur ser­vice allo­ca­tion, our abil­i­ty to oper­ate in cer­tain parts of the band and at the pow­er lev­els allowed today is like­ly to be con­strained if reg­u­la­tors want to pro­tect the RNSS receivers. This dis­cus­sion will con­tin­ue in the devel­op­ment of the Guid­ance Rec­om­men­da­tion in ITU‑R WP5A.

WP4C ple­nary agreed to ele­vate the doc­u­ment to Draft New Report sta­tus and passed it to Study Group 4 (SG4) for adop­tion. There­fore draft­ing work is complete.

Study Group 4 met on Sep­tem­ber 23^rd and adopt­ed the report for pub­li­ca­tion. IARU is total­ly engaged in the dis­cus­sion that will con­tin­ue in WP5A to ensure that the ama­teur ser­vices can con­tin­ue to devel­op in this band and allow all the ama­teur appli­ca­tions in use today to continue.