RSGB and WSPR: change of heart?

A couple of years ago, as has been recounted here many times, I wrote to the RSGB about the problem of long-term WSPR beaconing results being interrupted - sometimes for days - by the likes of RTTY and CW contests.  Such interruptions also repeat most weekends.  Other, similar problems have also recently arisen, due to WST-X assigning frequencie to itself.

The RSGB's response at the time was that, if any member suffered problems, they 'should QSY'.  Rather obviously, this was as ignorant as it was surprising!   It also tended to show that WSPR was not understood as a form of beaconing within the UK's representative body for amateur radio (would they have suggested QSYing for a 'traditional' beacon suffering interference?)

Since then, there has been no progress towards putting WSPR in a protected beacon area of the bands, despite the meteoric growth in the number of WSPR users, partly down to the availability of cheap, highly portable transmitters such as WSPRlite.  Some hard-nosed people argue that WSPR is not a real beacon, and that a WSPR transmitter can't, as is clearly obviously done by a large number of people every day, lawfully be operated unattended.

This latter argument undoubtedly has some truth in it.  But law does not operate in a vacuum, and must reflect pragmatic reality.  The general consensus of today's reality is that, so long as a WSPR beacon is not left so unattended as to make near-immediate shutdown impossible (say, by going on holiday), then the outputs involved are, some (like me) argue, unlikely to make operation without a human actually sitting next to it unlawful.  After all, OFCOM hasn't prosecuted any operator for causing 'intereference' since anyone can remember (source: OFCOM Freedom of Information Act request, ca. 2011).

The only other argument against moving WSPR to the beacon portion of the bands comes singularly from some of the crazier people in the USA.  They see any form of change and protection as 'big government interference', the kind of interference such people tend to believe needs the carrying of guns to defend themselves against.  Such arguments from the Land of the Trump need no further consideration.

Back in the real world, the fixed frequencies within the WSJT-X software (and others) makes coordinated changes to another set of frequencies more difficult, in that it would realistically require a new version of the software to be released, so that everyone was herded to the same watering hole.  But that is easy to do - we get new software releases all the time.

Sadly, the clear problem with giving more protection to WSPR beaconing is not that it can't be done, or that it would need such progress through layers of committees as to be not worth the effort.  No, the real problem is that there is no pressure from the WSPR community itself.

So I was somewhat surprised over Christmas, in correspondence with a serious WSPR user, to learn the following:

'Peter, G3XJE, is on the RSGB Propagation Committee.  He's investigating what real scientific data can be derived from the WSPR database.'

Well, I suppose we have to welcome that WSPR is now catching the attention of the RSGB at committee level (they love committees), and by someone who appears to be a scientist in his own professional right.

To G3XJE, I would say this:

'Yes!  There is an awful lot of 'real' scientific data that can be gleaned from WSPR, and I haven't a clue why the RSGB is only now taking an interest in WSPR, many years after it first appeared.  Please continue to take an interest - and look at simple ways to get WSPR over to a protected area of the bands, because the current allocation is prone to interference and making the data much less 'really scientific.  We all potentially stand to benefit from WSPR use, either personally or collectively.'