The 30th meeting of WG FM’s Maritime Forum group was held last 21-22 March at the offices of Germany’s Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway (BNetzA) in Hamburg, chaired by Jaap Steenge of the Netherlands.
The group’s work mainly covers questions concerning maritime mobile service and maritime radio-navigation; the activity carried out is reported to WG FM.
Various issues were considered at this meeting, with the following standing out:
- accompaniment of work to develop some ECC draft decisions, namely on harmonised usage of frequencies in the VHF maritime mobile band for vessels and on harmonised usage of the channels of RR Appendix 18 for the terrestrial component of the VHF Data Exchange System (VDES);
- accompaniment of matters concerning the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), specifically results of the fifth meeting of the Subcommittee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue (NCSR), held in February 2018 in London;
- accompaniment of matters concerning the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), with a special focus on items associated to the revision of ITU-R Recommendation M. 493-14 and interference on board vessels due to the installation of lights using LED technology;
- maritime radiocommunication and cybersecurity, focusing on possible affected areas in the scope of maritime communications.
