FCC proposes new filing fee structure, new fees for ham radio

How many "less than 18 or still in college" are using a top of the line cell phone that requires a monthly cell fee?

Let's stop creating "victims". There is nothing unreasonable about the fee structure proposed. As N2EY indicated there is nothing new here. A proposal is not a change in the regulation.

 

People who buy multi-kilobuck radios to "ragchew" with other people on multi-kilobuck radios complain about a $50 fee paid once per decade? That's $5/year. Maybe cut back on 1 Starbucks latte a year and put that fiver in the "license fee jar".

Chris

 

OK. So $50 every ten years. That's not going to break me. I'll just give up my ARRL membership to make up the difference.

Impact on "young people" ? Hard to say. What's a "young people"? If my grandkids had any interest in getting licensed, I'd just give them the $50. Then by the time they'd have to renew, they'd no longer be "young people" and will decide for themselves whether it's worth $50. I think most parents, grandparents would foot the $50 bill if it's something their "young people" really wanted. It's peanuts compared to having to buy them a new iPhone every year. So I don't think a $50 fee is going to kill amateur radio for young people.

Who it will impact is people lower on the economic spectrum, young or old, for whom $50 is difference between buying food, diapers, paying electric bill.

 

50$ for a renewel? Or some beginner needs to pay 50 to get the privilege to talk on a 40$ Chinese handheld as a tech? No sale. Let them have your license back. If you want to yack, you can get on 11 meters and wait for sporadic E or sunspots to come back up. Mod you ham gear and put it to work. You can run as much power as you can buy, make up your own custom "callsign" as you please, and go to it. FCC forgot 11M and left it as a jungle of free communications! And no chance of any other service taking over there, they would be run off in 15 minutes, no matter what they paid for the spectrum. Yea, you can pay or you can go "outlaw" where there is no law. Never done that freebander stuff but they sure set fat and happy and do as they please!

 

The cell phone monthly fee is worth it. Charging $50 for an amateur license, for a hobby that hasn't got the attraction that smartphones do, is going to decrease our numbers...which is what THEY want.

 

Why is it that people that want to control where anyone spends their money, always ASSume Starbucks coffee is being purchased? My license expires in 8 more years I think...so if I start saving up now....welcome to no fee pirate radio.

 

In many of our cases, our next renewal will probably be a lifetime renewal, LOL.

 

What it will do is reduce the number of inactive licenses on the books. Which may be hundreds of thousands. People who are really not that interested in the first place just won't get licenses, and people who are inactive won't just rotely renew for the heck of it. 20 years from now, there could be hundreds of thousands fewer licenses on the books than there are now.

 

Hey man for $29 you can buy a dual band radio from China....who needs a license.

 

By then the ARRL membership will be $2499.95

 

...and like the GROL and GMDSS licenses from FCC? I think my GMDSS license actually has "lifetime" stamped on it somewhere...

I think the problem with lifetime AR licenses is that the station license is combined with the operator license, and the station license contains the call.

They could certainly find a way to break that up so that the call isn't permanently attached to the lifetime license, and then we could have lifetime licenses, I suppose?

If we just dropped the vanity system, it would become trivially easy to have lifetime AR licenses in the US. Everybody gets a systematic call that they can keep for life. If you don't like your call, you can roll the dice for a new systematic call, and then that one becomes your "permanent" call sign.

Decisions.

 

I urge all to go and make your comments known during this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking time frame.

 

Yeah...when the FCC sees we really only have 320,000 active hams (proving they are active by sending in the $50) it'll be easier for them to just sell the spectrum and be done with it.

 

Yes. Callsign churning will get expensive!