ARRL-VEC Picks up Personnel

The ARRL-VEC now has seven fulltime, three temporary, and eight just-added volunteer staff members chipping away at the mountain of applications resulting from the April 15 license restructuring. ARRL-VEC Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, reports his staff now is wrapping up April 24 receipts from VE sessions. The ARRL-VEC received nearly 23,000 applications between April 15 and May 26.

Assistant to the ARRL-VEC Manager Wayne Irwin, W1KI, follows up by telephone to gather information missing from an applicant's Form NCVEC 605. In the background, temporary ARRL-VEC employee Jane Foy keys in data from an application form. [Rick Lindquist, N1RL]

ARRL-VEC staff was able to submit some 5000 applications to the FCC this week, up significantly from previous weeks. On May 25 alone, 1453 applications were filed with the FCC. Jahnke still estimates it will take approximately six weeks from exam session to the time the paperwork is filed electronically with the FCC, although some grants have been showing up sooner than that. The key is when the session paperwork arrived at ARRL-VEC. The FCC typically grants applications overnight.

Jahnke says there were approximately 4000 applications in the April 24 receipts alone that include sessions as long ago as March 25 and as recent as April 18. ARRL-VEC processes applications according to the date the package arrives in the mail. "We have staff working over the weekend, and we will have staff working over the holiday weekend," he said.

Inquiries concerning the status of applications continue to impair the staff's ability to rapidly process the incoming stacks of applications. "You can't blame people for wanting to know what their status is, but when everyone wants to know, progress slows," Jahnke said. Another thing that slows progress is having to follow up on missing or incomplete information on the NCVEC Form 605 application from a test session.

Jahnke has estimated that the first 30 days of the restructuring surge--April 15 through May 15--will yield 17,200 new Generals and 13,100 new Extras.

The ARRL-VEC is now posting the status of test session processing at http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/status.html.

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