Wireless Microphone Compliance Guide for Small Entities Hits the Books

Last week the FCC released a wireless microphone compliance guide for small businesses and organizations. The guide is quite thin, for a guide, and it does not tell us anything we did not already know from the initial R&O released earlier this year. But, it is a distillation of some relevant portions of that dense tome, and for that reason, if you don’t have the time to read the entire R&O (you don’t), your time will be well spent reading the guide. We also summarized some of the information in the R&O here.

The compliance guide covers the following topics: 

• The expanded eligibility requirements for facilities operating more than 50 devices, which now entitles them to Part 74 licensure. Sadly, there are no instructions for how a facility is supposed to go about obtaining a license. (Hopefully, the RF Venue blog will cover that in the near future) 
• Unlicensed devices will still be eligible for database protection under certain circumstances. We wrote about this process at length, here.
• A reiteration of the hierarchical rights of licensees, and non-interference rules with higher ranking services. Part 74 users are secondary users, and must yield to primary users, like TV stations.
• A discussion of the obligation of wireless microphones to vacate spectrum auctioned in the incentive auctions. 

Image courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives. (Try and find a better picture to illustrate a post about small entitiy compliance guides, I dare you).