Keeping up with Amateur Radio bandplans
Once you get your amateur license and have some equipment to work with (or are even shopping for equipment.) You’ll likely be having a bit of a time keeping the band plans straight. Band plans are suggestions for usage of spectrum and typically specify that data is to be used in a certain range, CW (morse) in range, voice (phone) in this range, etc. Additionally, after the studying for the exam you may have lost what little you remembered about what frequency range a technician or general license is limited to… That’s why reference material is made so you don’t HAVE to remember everything.
Now of course you can buy nifty references like this HF VHF UHF operating guide which is a nice looking spiral bound guide. This (and some others) offer more than just the bandplan information, but other guidelines and rules to be observed in a specific band, beacon frequencies, national calling frequencies, etc… some nice info in a small spiral bound reference.
The monitoring times also has a downloadable quick guide to the shortwave spectrum for under 30Mhz reference.
The ARRL has the Considerate operators frequency guide as well as a text version of the current band plans.
w1cgs has another downloadable and printable pdf band plan with a seperate page for each meter band and room for notes. One nice thing here is that he has greyscale and color versions for those that may have a monochrome laserjet to print on. This one has seperate VHF and HF donwloads.
Of course, I’m sure there are others either for free download or purchase and after all, you could make your own too… but no matter how you get it, it’s a reference that’s useful.
