1,600+ Radio Licences Cancelled

[Peter.L.]

Good Evening People,

It is coming to the end of the first month of ICASA's reshuffled licence year, i.e. 1st April to 31st March, and hopefully most of you will by now have received, and maybe paid, your licence renewal notices. I have to advise, however, that 1,621 licences were cancelled by our Joburg Head Office on 30th March this year due mainly to outstanding or unpaid licence fees. The criteria used for cancellation was: if fees on a particular licence were outstanding for more than 365 days, the licence was summarily cancelled. This effectively means that, if for some reason you did not pay the licence fee at the beginning of 2010, in all probability the licence will have been cancelled, which obviously will be of great concern comes inspection time.

It is obviously not impossible that ICASA may have not credited payments made to various licences because we received no notification of payment. Additionally, your licence address may have changed in the last couple of years and we do not have the new address on record, which means that the renewal notices would have gone to the old addresses and would probably have been "z-filed" by the new owners. There are other reasons which may have contributed to non-payment (or late payment after the cut-off date of 31/03/2011) but, whatever the case, the bottom line now is that if you have not received a renewal advice from ICASA for either the recent 3-month extension period, from 01/01/2011 to 31/03/2011, or for the new licence year from 01/04/2011 to 31/03/2012, regardless of whether or not you have proof of payment, please make enquiries as to the status of your licence/s at the earliest opportunity. Licences cancelled as of 30/03/2011 may be re-instated relatively easily if proof of payment of the relevant fees can be produced and it can be shown that an error has occurred on our side, however, this will not be the case for any great length of time and there will eventually come a date after which a licence will not be re-instateable and a totally new application will have to be made, along with the additional fees involved.

I already hear some of you complaining about government inefficiency, etc, etc, (probably with good reason) but, please, may we leave the recriminations for later and sort out the potential problems first so that as few persons as possible are inconvenienced. You can lodge enquiries at any regional office of ICASA, our Head Office in Joburg or even send me an email (my address is pleonard"at"icasa"dot"org"dot"za but I don't promise to reply by return if there's a lot of queries!, maybe by the following day!!). All our contact details are available on our website at http://www.icasa.org.za however, I would caution against using the "info" address as it appears to operate sporadically. The main details required to identify the licence concerned is preferably the licence number, alternatively the aircraft's registration letters (radio callsign). If you would rather discuss matters first, you are welcome to phone me at 031-3349515 and, if I cannot assist you myself, I'll try and direct you to someone who can.

Regards from sunny, but cool, Durbs,

Peter