IARU Region 1 Conference Papers Address Satellite Spectrum Issues

Papers for the IARU Region 1 General Conference, being held in Vienna, Austria, 19-23 September 2026, are now available online, and several are of direct interest to the amateur satellite community.

Among the papers in the VHF+ (C5) section is VI26_C5_11, “UHF Spectrum Situation,” submitted by the Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB), which addresses AST SpaceMobile’s use of amateur spectrum. In April, the FCC announced that AST SpaceMobile (AST & Science, LLC) will be using the amateur 430 MHz band for 248 satellites in its planned low-Earth-orbit constellation, which aims to provide global cellular broadband communications. Centre frequencies are 430.5 MHz, 432.3 MHz, 434.1 MHz, 435.9 MHz, and 439.5 MHz, each with 50 kHz bandwidth.

Another satellite-related paper is VI26_C3_45, the report of the ARSPEX Working Group, a specialised body of IARU Region 1 for Amateur Radio Space EXploration.

The full set of IARU-R1 Conference papers may be found at https://conf.iaru-r1.org/documents/