a cory
of this
HIGH FREQUENCY BROADCASTING FROM HONG KONG
The abandonment of the Colony's claim.
The international conference now sitting at Mexico minulé City has the task of evolving a generally acceptable plan of international allocation of high frequencies
is on 964341R. (short wavelengths), which will fit a quart (16,000
32/96834/R/49
daily hours of high frequency broadcasting time, or
channel hours', claimed by the nations) into a pint
?
pot (5,000 to 7,000 channel hours, which is all of the spectrum left for high frequency broadcasting by earlier international conferences).
2. It follows that national claims have to be reduced by 56 to 69% for any plan to be practicable.
3. We were informed on 7.2.49 by telegram from the United Kingdom delegation to this Conference that it had already "agreed to a voluntary reduction in United Kingdom Colonial claims
by 38%". A suggested
distribution of this reduction was made by the delegation and our views required within about 48 hours. Some of these reductions could not be accepted for reasons of policy and it was necessary hurriedly to review all Colonial claims in order to see what reductions should be made since substantial reductions of some kind were clearly unavoidable.
4. It was decided to abandon the whole Hong Kong claim for 28 Channel hours for the following reasons.
5.
When the Colonies' claims were originally submitted to the Conference early in 1948, the Foreign Office pressed that Colonies' claims for high frequencies should be limited to their own domestic needs, that is to say that they should not increase the quart, referred to in para. 1. above, by claiming frequencies in order to broadcast to neighbouring territories, foreign or Colonial, without some very special reason such as the need for Hausa broadcasts from Accra to Nigeria so long as Nigeria has no transmitter of its own. We could not deny that this was reasonable, and events have proved it so, since otherwise we should now be having to cut Colonial claims even more severely. We did, however, succeed in insisting, against some opposition from the Foreign office, that a single exception should be made for Hong Kong on the ground that it might at some future date want to broadcast a service to South China and that it was differently placed in many ways from any other Colony.
6.
A claim for 281⁄2 Channel hours was therefore submitted for this purpose for Hong Kong. (Hong Kong needs no high frequency broadcasting for domestic needs, since the smallness of its area requires the use of medium, not high, frequencies).
7. In November, 1948, the Foreign Office suggested to the Commissioner-General's Conference, as one of a number of ways to counter Chinese Communist influence, that the domestic medium-frequency service in Hong Kong might be made audible in South China by increasing the power of transmission. This suggestion was endorsed by the Commissioner-General and later by the Colonial Information Policy Committee in London.
/ 8.
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