Amateur Allocations Print
Written by Rick Kirchhof, NG5V   
Monday, 28 June 2010 00:20

Amateur Allocations - Something to think about

Did you know that US amateurs have access to:

  • 3.764 MHz of HF (160m-10m) spectrum
  • 12 MHz of VHF (6m-1.25cm) spectrum
  • 661 MHz between 225mhz and 10ghz
  • 22.7 GHz of microwaves between 10ghz and 275ghz

Here is a chart you can use to show how much bandwidth is assigned in each USA ham band.


Of the above, over 99% of hams use a tiny fraction (0.3%) of the total ham frequency allocations while the remainder of our available ham allocation is essentially ignored. By the way, ARRL said that as of 2/2013, there were about 710,000 personal ham radio licenses in the USA. We know that only some of these are active hams. If only one percent of personal licensees were microwave users, that would be 7100 hams. We often hear that the majority of licensed hams are inactive. How many microwave experimenters do you know?

Stake your claim to the microwave bands using Broadband over Amateur Radio.


Even the Technician License includes full access to the entire ham microwave spectrum. 

Last Updated on Sunday, 24 February 2013 23:08