IARU’s pri­or­i­ty is the avail­abil­i­ty of spec­trum to the ama­teur ser­vice. This means both the fre­quen­cy allo­ca­tions for the ama­teur ser­vice and also keep­ing that spec­trum clear of unwant­ed emis­sions from elec­tri­cal devices.

In recent years, IARU has become very con­cerned about the increas­ing noise lev­els on the ama­teur bands. Sources include Solar PV instal­la­tions, PLT (BPL) sys­tems, DSL sys­tems and a wide range of low pow­er dig­i­tal devices, many of which are poor­ly designed and do not meet the cur­rent Euro­pean emis­sion stan­dards. Wire­less pow­er trans­mis­sion for elec­tric vehi­cles seems like­ly to be anoth­er major threat to radio communication.

IARU is active in inter­na­tion­al stan­dards forums and makes strong input to argue for the main­te­nance of appro­pri­ate emis­sion lim­its to pre­vent harm­ful inter­fer­ence to radio services.

As a part of this work it is impor­tant that indi­vid­ual ama­teur radio oper­a­tors make input to their nation­al reg­u­la­tor when they suf­fer harm­ful inter­fer­ence from non-radio devices. The EMC Com­mit­tee pages of the IARU Region 1 web­site explain more about this.

There is anoth­er aspect to spec­trum pro­tec­tion, that of ensur­ing that ama­teur spec­trum does not become pop­u­lat­ed with sta­tions that are not enti­tled to oper­ate in there. For more infor­ma­tion vis­it the IARU Mon­i­tor­ing Sys­tem page list­ed on the menu to the left.