WARC becomes WRC

International Radio Regulations are a big bureaucratic mess. Its often a case of too many lawyers and politicians and too few engineers. I cant decide if the World Administrative Radio Conference was the solution or an extension of the problem. WARC is a technical conference for the International Telecommunications Union. It gathers delegates from all member nations, and the ARRL to name a few.Their first meetings was in 1979, as a preparatory conference in Panama. The real 4-week conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland later that year. The meeting was long overdue. Surprisingly, the petty in-fighting was over-come and a few good things came of even this first gathering.

Three segments of the short wave band were set aside internationally for amateur shortwave use. These are 30 meters (10.100–10.150 MHz), 17 meters (18.068–18.168 MHz) and 12 meters (24.890–24.990 MHz). Today we call these the WARC bands. They also determined the radio identifications of medical transports, decided on a set of rules governing the geostationary orbits of broadcasting satellites and a slew of other rulings on unrelated topics

In 1995 they decided to change the name to The World Radio Communications Conference abbreviated WRC. You can look up their regulations by conference name.

• ITU World Administrative Radio Conference 1979 (WARC-79)
• ITU World Administrative Radio Conference 1984 (WARC-84)
• ITU World Administrative Radio Conference 1992 (WARC-92)
• ITU World Radiocommunications Conference 1995 (WRC-95)
• ITU World Radiocommunications Conference 1997 (WRC-97)
• ITU World Radiocommunications Conference 2000(WRC-2000)
• ITU World Radiocommunications Conference 2003 (WRC-2003)
• ITU World Radiocommunications Conference 2007 (WRC-2007)