Over the past decades, con­cerns have grown about a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of radio ama­teurs on the bands, whose on-air behav­iour was in dan­ger of spoil­ing enjoy­ment of ama­teur radio for the major­i­ty. Ama­teur radio relies on a strong lev­el of self-dis­ci­pline in on-air oper­at­ing and the new ways of acquir­ing ama­teur licences could some­times bypass the tra­di­tion­al ways of pass­ing on oper­at­ing skills from gen­er­a­tion to generation.

In 2008 John ON4UN and Mark ON4WW wrote a com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­ment enti­tled “Ethics and Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures for the Radio Ama­teur“, doc­u­ment aim­ing to become a uni­ver­sal guide for new­com­ers and old-timers alike on the sub­ject of oper­at­ing ethics and oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures. In 2008 the prin­ci­ples of this doc­u­ment were accept­ed by the IARU Admin­is­tra­tive Coun­cil. Dur­ing fur­ther region­al IARU meet­ings it was empha­sized that the doc­u­ment be made avail­able via all means, and at no cost, in as many lan­guages as pos­si­ble to the ham radio fra­ter­ni­ty. You can read more about the back­ground to the doc­u­ment John and Mark wrote here.

Such was the accep­tance of the doc­u­ment that with­in two years, it had been trans­lat­ed into more than 25 lan­guages.  In some coun­tries the doc­u­ment is also offered in print­ed for­mat and a large num­ber of ama­teur radio sites have a link to the doc­u­ment on their site, either in Eng­lish or in the local language(s). Our most sin­cere thanks go to all our friends who spent hun­dreds of hours to pre­pare these trans­la­tions. You can access all the ver­sions of the doc­u­ment here.

In 2016, the respon­si­bil­i­ty for main­tain­ing and devel­op­ing the doc­u­ment was tak­en over by IARU. IARU will build on the work of the authors to ensure that the doc­u­ment con­tin­ues to be rel­e­vant in the future and remains a ref­er­ence for good oper­at­ing prac­tice in Ama­teur Radio

What can you find here?

To achieve eas­i­er access to all of the exist­ing ver­sions and lan­guages of the doc­u­ment, this sec­tion of the web­site con­tains a list­ing of all ver­sions / lan­guages, sort­ed by coun­try, where you can down­load the doc­u­ment from either one of two sources:

• from the IARU Region 1 web­site, where these doc­u­ments are con­tin­u­ous­ly kept updated
• from a link to the Radio Soci­eties that make the doc­u­ment avail­able on their site

You can also down­load a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion intend­ed to help peo­ple who want to gives talks on the sub­ject in their radio clubs. The .ppt ver­sion is avail­able in four lan­guages (Eng­lish, French, Por­tuguese and Dutch).

Please feel free to feed back your com­ments about this site to the Pres­i­dent of IARU Region 1 – Don Beat­tie, G3BJ. He can be con­tact­ed at president@iaru-r1.org

We also pro­vid­ed a few links to web­sites that pur­sue the same goal as we do: make our bands a bet­ter place to enjoy our fan­tas­tic hobby.