Five Megs For Five More Years

It is not official yet but the word from Colin G3PSM on the UK Five Megs Yahoo Group is that Ofcom have received notification from Ministry of Defence on Thursday that they were content to extend the current arrangement for a further 5 years. He goes on to say that the formal Ofcom announcement on their website which should be made in the coming week and everybody should wait for it before contacting them about renewals of Notices of Variation.

For those of us with NoVs for the sixty metre band this is great news but falls short of the hoped for permanent allocation that some countries have recently been awarded. No need to cut down my 5mHz dipole for another band or solder the diode back in to my rig to remove its wide band capability just yet.

The main interest in the sixty metre band is its often magical properties for Near Vertical Incident Skywave which makes it wonderful (most of the time) for inter-UK working. Lots of SOTA activators are QRV on the band because even on a couple of watts in to a low dipole they can make contacts up and down the country during daylight, something not possible very often on the higher bands and usually only during hours of darkness on the lower bands. During the hour of darkness however sixty can be great for long skip contacts such as the states.