A report on progress with the foundation licence

At the end of the first week of December, seven short weeks since the foundation licence was introduced, the WIA office has despatched 241 assessment packs of which 92 have been returned. ACMA have issued 40 foundation licences, 12 in VK2, 12 in VK3, 14 in VK4 and 2 in VK7. We are on track to have well over 100 foundation licences by years end.

The office will continue to ship 50 assessment packs each week till mid December and then take a well earned 3 week Christmas break before recommencing shipping and processing more assessment packs in January.

30 Radio clubs right across Australia have told us that they are or shortly will be offering training courses and assessment. We expect the number of clubs offering training to grow quite quickly over the next few weeks. A complete list of clubs offering foundation licence training and their contact details will be added to the web shortly.

25 additional people have applied to be trained as WIA assessors and it is expected that Fred Swainston will conduct the next training course in March. The venue for this training course will be announced shortly. After completion of the March training we should have around 140 WIA assessors and nominated assessors.

The foundation licence manual is continuing to sell like hot cakes. We have shipped almost all the manuals on order and we have all but worn out John Weir, VK3ZRV. John, with assistance from the office staff has shipped well over 1000 manuals.

The WIA foundation licence information enquiry e-mail address of foundation@wia.org.au has been busy, answering questions on the foundation licence and many clubs have reported
that they are busy dealing with foundation licence enquiries.

The WIA foundation licence team is now working on finalizing the foundation licence remote assessments procedure. One completion of the procedure a nominated assessor will be able to assess candidates for an amateur licence in remote areas of Australia. Several people in remote areas have already applied to be assessed and we expect assessments to start in around a weeks time.

Many of the successful foundation licence candidates are joining the WIA. Membership number have been growing over the last 18 months and has now started to grow at a rapid rate. Over the last 4 weeks 47 people have joined the WIA. It would seem that we are starting to see a substantial growth in the number of Amateurs and WIA members.

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