Friday, June 18, 2021

Congrats Dutch Novice license holders

 Congrats Dutch novice license holders. It took about 5 years to get some more space on the amateur radio bands. Besides that you don't have to reduce power to 25W anymore and can use full power from a 100W radio.

Starting today this is what you get:

• Use 100 watts PEP for frequencies below 30 MHz

• Use the full 40-meter band (7.0 – 7.2 MHz)

• Use 20-meter band (14.00 – 14.25 MHz)

• Use full 10-meter band (28.0 – 29.7 MHz)

• VHF and UHF unchanged

• No minimum age limit to get a license

However, there seems that they made a mistake. Originally the N-license holders would get access to the entire 20m band. Agentschap Telecom is trying to solve this mistake.

I've been a novice license holder in 1998 for one year. If you look for my PD1AKZ call on QRZ you will be redirected to my PE4BAS callsign site. We only had access to VHF/UHF with 25W max at that time. If we had HF access at that time I would still have the PD1AKZ license I guess. For people that are just getting into this hobby this is a great improvement.

Update:

Good news for F-license HF operators as well. From today we are officially allowed to do FT8 on 30m at 10.136 MHz. Previously we were only allowed to do digital modes above 10.140 MHz. This was no problem when PSK31/64 was populair. But till now we were restricted to FT4 only. From today on we can finally try to hunt for DXCC with FT8 on the 30m band.

Official document:

https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2021-31799.html

1 comment:

Photon said...

All good, sensible developments. The kind we hope to see, but never do, in the UK.