Technology at its finest ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

So, the 19th of February 2024 came and went. As it was, my day started with the highest minimum that month, 27.5 degrees Celsius, that's the minimum overnight temperature. The maximum that day here in Perth, Western Australia was 42.3 degrees. The day before was the highest maximum for the month, 42.9. If you're not sure, that's over 109 in Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's scale.

That same day the Australian regulator, the ACMA, launched a new era in Amateur Radio. Moving from personal amateur licenses we legally became part of a class license regime. We have the option to hand our license back and get a refund, but the cautious side of me prevailed and I've not yet handed back my license, since it's currently the only proof that my callsign is valid, the one issued to me in December 2010.

I contacted the ACMA to ask about this and was told that they were having display issues with their system and was sent an image showing both my callsigns and email address. I'm not saying that I don't trust the person sending this to me, but I'm fairly sure that "but your honour, it was in an email" isn't going to cut it if push comes to shove. Curiously my name appears to be missing, showing the word "Blank" instead. Their IT team has been working on displaying F-calls for weeks now. I mean, seriously, these were first issued in 2005. Do we really need to spell this out?

The ACMA continues to actively encourage amateurs to hand in their license and points out that any delay in doing so will reduce the amount that may be due. It also points at Schedule 4, Part 2 subclause (7)(1)(d) of the Radiocommunications (Amateur Stations) Class Licence 2023, to assure me that my callsign is mine and mine alone, irrespective of what's in the register. It goes on to say that the letter they sent back in January, the one they had to resend, since they got my callsign details wrong, explained that I could hand back my license and that my ability to operate hinged on my qualification, not my callsign.

Here's the rub. Let's say that I'm qualified and that the letter I have proves it. I am required to identify myself on-air, the regulations say so. This means that in order for me to claim that I am who I say I am, there needs to be a register with that callsign. Apparently I'm in the register, but nobody other than the regulator can prove that.

One thing that appears to be missing is a solid understanding that the register of callsigns is used by the amateur community to determine if a callsign heard on-air is assigned or not. I mean, I could call myself VK6EEN and without the register who's to say that it's mine?

It's not confidence inspiring to say the least.

Then there's the register itself. There's an online component, which you can use to search for a callsign. As I said, mine isn't visible, neither is any other four letter F-call. As a test, I've been scrolling, one page at a time, for the past hour, to get to VK6F, starting at VK6A, to see if it shows up, but I'm not holding my breath. For some reason the developers who built this appear incapable of rendering a simple table in anything less than 36 seconds per page, so much so that Chrome thinks that the page has crashed and offers to kill it, every time.

Funnily enough, if you extract the URL from within the page and copy it, you can download all 176 pages for VK6 callsigns in less time than it took me to write this sentence. Unsurprisingly, F-calls are not there. Did I mention that this software, released a month ago, is already using depreciated features in my current web browser, which came out a week before the new register went live?

It gets better.

If you actually want to manage your callsign, you need to create an account on the regulator's portal, called ACMA Assist. When you load the ACMA Assist URL and click the "Sign up or log in" button, 134 different URLs from all over the Internet are hit, across 34 different domains, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Markmonitor, Monsido, several content, font, icon and javascript libraries, and plenty more. This is a Government website, requiring that I authenticate to it, and to do that, I'm required to provide more identity documents than the tax department needs and wait for it, authentication is outsourced to some random domain, so you're entering your details into a third-party service.

You have the choice of using the Government identity provider, one that requires a mobile phone and an app, or use a Government owned company that prefers a mobile and a different app, but offers access via a website on yet another domain.

Now it gets funky. If you pick "driver's license", you'll discover that everything that's on your license is information that the form wants. So anyone with a photo of your license can sign up and identify as you, like the chemist who required a photocopy of it so you could buy Sudafed for your debilitating hay fever, because instead, you might use it to create methamphetamine, or the nightclub that required it so you could enter the venue because of course they do, or the telecommunications company that provided access to your details during a recent hack.

Just so we're clear here. I'm now required to validate my identity to access a callsign that is already in the database, already has my email address linked to it and is for an amateur license that I already have been in possession of and paid for since 2010. Never mind that I used to email the regulator to have them issue an invoice that I paid for via credit card, no authentication at all, and that was for a personal license, issued specifically to me.

We'll also ignore that if you signed up with ACMA Assist a year ago, you don't need to validate, not then, not now.

Speaking of email. The ACMA has just sent me one telling me that I can request and fill in a form and email or fax it to them to update my records instead. That's interesting, but what about the privacy implications of tracking by the worlds mega corporations on a Government site or even the security theatre for something that according to the regulator isn't even my permission to operate?

I'm all for giving the regulator the benefit of doubt, but if this is the future of Amateur Radio Licensing in Australia, I'm beginning to wonder just which Wild West Orwellian landscape I stepped into and I'm asking myself is this the best that our limited tax payer dollars can achieve?

If you want to see this for yourself, open up your browser, press F12 and have a look at the network connection tab while you visit the ACMA Assist portal.

Finally, I have one question.

Why are our so-called representative bodies, the WIA and RASA, not jumping up and down about this?

Apparently,

I'm Onno VK6FLAB