Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past few months I've been investigating the history of the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, to help it celebrate a century of amateur radio achievements. If you're a radio amateur and you pay anyone a membership fee, I have questions for you. Let me set the stage with a quote from the IARU: "All licensed radio amateurs benefit from the work of the IARU, whether or not they are members of their national IARU member-society. But every licensed radio amateur should be a member. Only by combining our efforts in this way can we ensure the future health of amateur radio, for ourselves and for future generations." That's straight from the IARU website. It seems like a lofty and worthy aspiration. Before I proceed, let me assure you that I'm absolutely committed to improving this hobby and this community, committed to strengthening its representation, its reach and increasing its activity levels. The IARU has existed for nearly a century. It consists of a global organisation and three regional ones, each working towards improving on, and advocating for, the amateur community. Governed by different constitutions each organisation pursues similar but not identical roles within its sphere of influence. Most, if not all IARU organisations are run by volunteers, people like you and I, who stick their hand up and help out, writing documents, attending meetings, updating websites, managing membership information and all the other things that the IARU apparently does. I say apparently because getting anything other than motherhood statements from any of the IARU organisations is like pulling teeth. To construct a historic list of elected office bearers, President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer and various regional Directors is an exercise in archaeology and much of the information doesn't appear to exist. That also seems to be true for what the IARU is spending its money on, your money. The IARU is funded by the fees that we pay to the representative body in our country, either directly, or as a member of a club who contributes. In my case, if I was paying a membership fee to the Wireless Institute of Australia, like I did for a decade, some of that would pass to IARU Region 3 and then from there, some would pass to the global IARU secretariat. Multiplied by every country and every paying member in that country across a century, there are significant, and to the best of my knowledge, unaccounted for sums of money involved. Then there is the list of things that the IARU has achieved. I don't doubt for a moment that people have been working very hard, giving it their all, helping, working late, doing things above and beyond to make outcomes appear, as-if by magic, without any of the blood sweat and tears associated with the process. I suppose it's like sausage, nobody wants to see how it's made, and I understand the sentiment. What of the outcomes, the published results? Should they be secret too? At the moment the IARU claims that it represents amateur radio on the global stage and on its website lists its achievements, namely: 21 MHz, Amateur Satellite, WARC bands, more Amateur Satellite bands, more 7 MHz frequencies, easing of restrictions in relation to disaster communications, 136 kHz, 472 kHz, 5 MHz, 50 MHz in Region 1, international roaming, and emergency communications. Impressive list right? There's twelve achievements listed in all, across 100 years, with meetings in cities all over the globe, with hundreds of people participating. Mind you, it appears that only recently has some level of coordination emerged between where meetings are held, by and large, each organisation meets every few years, staggered so there's always a meeting in a different country every year. Those frequent flyer miles must be adding up. If only there was another way to communicate across the globe. So, let's look at this in terms of effort and reward. Let's say that across the globe that at any one point in time there are 100 people part of the IARU infrastructure across the four organisations, or 25 in each. It's a modest representation. Let's say that they each volunteered 1 hour per week, so 52 hours a year, 5,200 hours across the entire IARU per year, or 520,000 hours across a century. This means that each achievement took more than 43,000 hours of volunteer effort. Unless of course there was more achieved that is undocumented. Mind you, 52 hours a year per volunteer is also probably light on, potentially by orders of magnitude. I note that for example there's no mention of things like quashing the 2m proposal by France where the local aviation authorities were looking to acquire some extra spectrum, or negotiations in relation to 1.2 GHz at the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 or WRC-23 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, held between 20 November and 15 December 2023. My point is this: What is the IARU doing? Is it really effective, or is it ...
