In September of 2021, the Irish regulator COMREG issued a document titled... "Proposed Strategy for Managing the Radio Spectrum 2022 to 2024" - Link HERE
In response to this document, COMREG received 26 submissions about the part related to amateur radio.
• 10 responses were received from individual radio amateurs; and
• 16 responses were received from clubs, organisations, groups or societies
Out of that 16, a large part were from essentially the same small organisation so it's more like 10 radio radio amateurs and roughly 10 organisations/clubs.
Some of the submissions were in relation to higher power limits. Another however was for COMREG to consider introducing a new novice amateur radio licence.
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| Graphic from the original ComReg document |
In response, ComReg wrote...
"ComReg’s assessment on novice licences
4.61 Taking into account the support expressed for entry-level or novice-licensing and
the strong justifications given above, ComReg will seek, in the timeline of this
strategy statement and subject to resources, to put in place a framework for
novice licensing in Ireland.
4.62 It is envisaged that to achieve this, ComReg will need to:
▪ Consult on its proposals;
▪ Make new Regulations, with the consent of the DECC Minister under
Section 6 of the Wireless Telegraphy Act ,1926, as amended; and
▪ tender for an external party to run any examination that may be required.
At this time ComReg would consider if that examination is best offered
online and, as a consequence, can be taken at any time."
The document with a summary of the proposals and the response from ComReg can be seen HERE
I was curious about what type of novice amateur radio licences were in other countries and I found this document on the DARC website (national society for radio amateurs in Germany). You can download it from HERE
There seems to be quite a variation in what it allowed. Some countries have a novice licence which allows extensive use of the HF and VHF bands and is little different from a full licence, some are VHF only and some allow limited access to the HF bands.
We'll have to wait and see what ComReg come up with but it has to be generous enough that it gets people interested but not undermine the existing full amateur radio licence.
One of the submissions justified the novice licence by means of STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths:
• such an action would align with the national policy for Ireland to be a leader in nurturing, developing and deploying STEM talent and the availability of a novice licence would enable the amateur radio service to act in the national interest;
It's not hard to imaging this being a good fit with say an allocation on the VHF bands and making use of the array of cubesats now in orbit. Novices could gain experience in how satellites orbit, what doppler shift is and how to make contacts through them.
If the novice licence includes an allocation on bands like 20m then I suspect it that a lot of the new callsigns will just end up on modes like FT8 and learn very little nothing in the process. It'll be just an amateur radio licence by another route.
My opinion... I'm pretty neutral about the whole novice licence and am just interested in seeing how it develops. I do hope though that ComReg look at a licence which might attract those with an interest in science and technology and not just those who want to go chase DX on the HF bands.
