FCC says no to requiring radio transmitters to be registered like firearms.
The FCC has denied a petition by Dale Reich to require all purchases of radio transmitters to be recorded and logged. In the same petition Reich asked that the FCC require registration tags to show that there is proof of a license to use equipment.
In it's order, the FCC relies heavily on the comments filed by REC as well as a joint opposition led by CompUSA.
The order states:
Given the concerns regarding the burden and cost of the proposals, we agree with the commenters that neither the Retail Petition nor the Tagging Petition provides “any coherent elaboration of any problem, either actual or perceived, that the remedies sought in the Petitions might be seen to purport to address.” We also agree with the Joint Commenters who note that, except for some vague references to law enforcement, neither Petition states what the proposed rules are supposed to accomplish. In this respect, we note that no law enforcement agency filed comments in support of Reich’s Tagging Petition; rather, the one commenter supporting the Petitions bases this view on the unsubstantiated statement that “[i]t is common knowledge that Amateur Radio equipment is being utilized by person(s) without the required FCC license.”
Reich has been filing many frivilious petitions for rulemaking including a very contraversial plan to give amateurs automatic upgrades based on tenure and compliance with the rules.
Reich has recently filed a petition to drop Morse requirements for Amateurs in light of the 2003 World Radio Conference. Reich's proposal is among one of several that have been recently issued rulemaking numbers.
