What changed
Organizations — edited Aug 31, 2026 by Unknown editor
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Amateur radio has no single governing body. What it has is a layered set of organizations: treaty
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bodies that divide the spectrum, national regulators that write the rules, national societies that
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represent operators, and specialty groups that run satellites, exams, awards and repeaters.
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- [NARA](/wiki/organizations/nara) — the National Amateur Radio Alliance, who publishes this wiki.
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- [National societies](/wiki/organizations/national-societies) — ARRL, RAC, RSGB, WIA and their
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counterparts, and what a national society actually does.
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- [International bodies](/wiki/organizations/international) — the ITU, the IARU and how a band gets
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allocated in the first place.
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- [Specialty organizations](/wiki/organizations/specialty) — AMSAT, TAPR, the VECs, the CW and QRP
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clubs, POTA and SOTA, and the emergency-communications groups.
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## Who actually has authority over you
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In the United States, exactly one organization can tell you what you may transmit: the **FCC**, in
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[Part 97](/wiki/rules/part-97-basics). Everything else — band plans, contest rules, award criteria,
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net procedures — is voluntary coordination that works because operators choose to follow it.
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That distinction matters. A band plan is not law, but ignoring it makes you the problem. A national
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society is not a licensing authority, but it is who shows up at the FCC and the ITU when somebody
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proposes taking a band away.
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## Why any of this is worth joining
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Membership organizations do three things an individual operator cannot: they **represent the service
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to regulators**, they **maintain shared infrastructure** (question pools, award programs, repeater
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coordination, satellites), and they **train the next operators**. See
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[clubs and community](/wiki/clubs) for the local layer, which is where most of the actual work
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happens.