As the amount of all kind of intruders in the Amateur Radio bands is rapidly crowing, the role of the IARU Monitoring System (IARUMS) is becoming more and more important. A number of national Monitoring Coordinators and Volunteers is watching our bands since many years, but more needs to be done to raise awareness of societies and countries where there exists actually no national monitoring team.
Your help, as Radio-Amateur operator or SWL is key to contribute in keeping our most important asset – the Amateur Radio spectrum – free of intruders.
How can you help?
Any day, when you are practising your radio activity, you can come across with a transmission that might make you suspect that is coming from an intruder. You can report it to the IARUMS National Coordinator at your society, or, if there’s not any, to the IARUMS Region 1 Coordinator: Gaspar Miró, EA6AMM, indicating the date, UTC time, frequency, mode (if known), identity (if any received) and country (if known), see details below. If you could join an audio recording (preferably, a .wav file), a screenshot and / or video of the signal that will be of great help. You can find the list of IARUMS R1 Coordinators here
Use your own radio to monitor the amateur bands. No special tools or knowledge are necessary. You can also use online tools that allow you to receive signals transmitted in the amateur bands as WebSDR or the KiwiSDR Network the Kiwi SDR with its excellent TDoA radio location options. You can find more information about them in our Technical Resources section.
In the case there’s no IARUMS National Coordinator in your society, and if you’d be interested in creating an Intruder Watch or help as Volunteer, you can:
- Try to find companions to help you. Each contributor can help you: Maybe one is very good at CW, maybe another one speaks foreign languages, perhaps another has special equipment to monitor digital modes, maybe some of them can be active during night time. Teamwork is important!
- Talk with your society’s Board of Directors about how important IARU Monitoring System is and try to get them convinced about creating an Intruder Watch.
- Create a Homepage for your Intruder Watch. Refer to the homepage of IARU Monitoring System in Region 1.
- Tell the future contributors what’s needed to file a report
about an intruder:- Date.
- UTC Time.
- Frequency in kHz.
- Mode (if known).
- Country of origin (if known).
- Identity (Callsigns if known).
- Remarks (language, locations, names, sked times…).
- A very important aspect is to have good relationship and contacts with your National Telecommunications Authorities. Please try to contact their officers personally and find a person who you can contact when you have a complaint of Interference. The best thing would be if it is always the same person.
We are not a Band Police !
Please be aware, we are not a band police. IARUMS shall not become involved in the monitoring and reporting of harmful interference in amateur bands caused by stations identified as or believed to be amateur stations! Also we do not monitor compliance of transmissions with band plans or contest rules etc.
Details see also Terms of Reference, points 2 and 12, here
We are also not responsible for any EMC matters!
