The ECBF (European CB Federation) has launched a survey called Project Band Plan. The details of which I’ll link below and they are available in Spanish and English language at the moment. With all the chatter in the background about loosing 27Mhz to license paying services then I think the idea behind this is a good one! Maybe limited in channels but better limited than no channels!
Now the details in Spanish: http://tinyurl.com/lx6569g
Details in English: http://tinyurl.com/lqvtpz9
And of course words directly from the ECBF:
The European Federation of CB invites all CB radio users to participate in a public survey to develop a Band Plan for CB, within the 40 channels that recognize the CB Majority of CB legislations in Europe.
At the following address (http://www.ecbf.eu/band-plan-cb.pdf) you can see the draft Band Plan on which work is begun and will be modified when the collection of surveys is finished. In principle, it will be active some months and periodically we will publish the results that are obtaining, for the knowledge of all.
Please spread this message among your groups, clubs and associations of Banda Ciudadana. It is very important that as many users as possible participate. Thank you all for your collaboration.
Currently the survey is available in Spanish and English.
So please start the survey. If you don’t take some time think what you can loose….
I think it’s a good starting point and can / could be evolved from here!
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For any United Kingdom Citizens’ Band users please feel free to contact me with your thoughts on this proposal via the E-mail link on the ECBF website.
I have already made my own views clear and understand a lot of the issues as Bob posted above (I agree with his thoughts on Channel 6).
Thanks for posting this news Simon.
David Ogg,
United Kingdom ECBF Delegate.
There is nobody to enforce whatever rule on CB band so bandplan or not there will always be some chaos. Of course a bandplan is always a suggestion for all to adhere to,but in this case the people at ECBF obviously didn’t take into account DX propagation wich makes signals travel worldwide on 11m… CW on ch 5 and 6 ??? really ??? CW needs clear frequencies and ch.6 is the worst place to be when propagation rolls in and the multi-kilowatt stations from N.America wreack havock on the “superbowl”. Ch. 6 is recognized as this usage since many decades and those users will never vacate their channel for CW !!! it’s like tring to batte a tank with a handfull of feathers !!
Second of all: digital modes on ch. 36 and 37 ?? again digi needs clear frequencies,these people haven’t been listening to the band for the past decades as ch 36 to 39 have always been devoted to SSB phone at least in N. America.
Don’t forget any other mode other that AM and SSB is not legal in N.America and other parts of the world have different rules too. Inevitably even if Europe has this or that bandplan there will always be some incompatible usages interfering when DX signals from the world start coming in. A good example is for us here in N.America, we hear a whole lot of FM traffic from Europe while nobody here is using this mode.
Very difficult to make a bandplan worldwide compatible since too many countries have different rules. But in my view all these different regulations should be taken into account because of the nature of the band thus propagation that goes with it.
That’s my take on the situation.
Here in Czech Republic, the CB band plan is defined by this document VO-R/7/01.2015-1 (https://www.ctu.cz/cs/download/oop/rok_2015/vo-r_07-01_2015-01.pdf). The document defines channels allocated for repeaters (CH18 and CH23), for emergency (CH9), call channel (CH1), call channel using DTMF (CH80), traffic (CH10, CH19)… so I guess that the ECBF should take some time to study EU and local regulations and incorporate them in the proposed band plan, otherwise it has small chance to succeed.
Ondrej