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GLOBAL SHORTWAVE COORDINATION MEETING THE HIGH FREQUENCY COORDINATION CONFERENCES By Bob Padula, Melbourne, Australia Originally published in the Electronic DX Press

110 SW frequency managers met in Kuala Lumpur in August for five days to coordinate their respective frequency schedules for the winter season. This followed a decision taken by the three active SW coordination groups n the world, the HF Coordination Conference/Arab States Broadcasting Union, and the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union HF Coordination group, to hold their respectve coordisniton meetings at he same venue.

Organised by the ABU, 55 SW broadcasting organisations from six continents were represented at the meeting. This is the first time in the history of SW spectrum management that such a large gathering of frequency managers assembled outside of the ITU. Normally, these groups meet separately in Europe/Africa and in Malaysia.

Chairman was Mr Oldrich Cip, Radio Prague and current Chairman of the HFCC. ABU Secretary General, Mr Hugh Leonard, spoke at the concluding session, indicating that he believed that SW radio had a rosy future, given the improvements expected through digitalisation and the wide reach unmatched so far by other competing delivery systems.

A joint schedule, containing frequencies of all he participants, was issued as a product of the meeting.

The meeting looked at some 7000 daily transmission frequencies and interference was eliminated from 17% of transmissions initially affected. It was decided to hold such meetings at three year intervals. The three groups also decided to prepare joint schedules for all forthcoming meetings, irrespective of whether the groups meet jointly or separately.(ABU)

- The HFCC/ASBU schedules are available to anyone for downloading at hffc://www.hfcc.org. It comes as a zip'd file, which includes various lists of abbreviations, which are vital for effective use of the list. The file has over 6000 entries, and prints out to around 100 pages A4, using a small font, after conversion into Excel format. The ABU data is not available publicly!