Radio astronomy, on its part, requires 'quiet zones' to be able to receive incoming cosmic signals unaffected by interference to enable astronomers and others learn about universe. The agenda item 1.16 of WRC-2000 contains a number of issues relevant for radio astronomy, but some of them are more important than others. The preparations for WRC-2000 have reached a close-to-final stages, with a number of proposals to this agenda item submitted to the ITU by many countries and groups of countries, like APT, CEPT and CITEL. There is no clear preference to anyone of these proposals since their differences are only minor. However, several points remain to be solved in the APT and CITEL. Fortunately, the preparation went very well, and consensus was reached on allocations above 71 GHz and three resolutions. The radio astronomy has obtained about 100 GHz of new spectrum allocations in bands above 71 GHz. In addition, a new resolution was approved by plenary meeting of WRC-2000. It deals with the consideration by a future WRC of sharing and compatibility issues between passive and active services in adjacent bands particularly with the space services (downlinks) into radio astronomy above 71 GHz. Therefore, in future, there should be a need for studies to be made to determine if and under what conditions sharing is possible, given that modifications were made on the basis of requirements known now and that little was known of requirements and implementation plans for active services in bands above 71 GHz.

We have analyzed the frequency sharing in the range of 71-275 GHz, which was adopted as a main topic of the WARC-2000 at the previous conference WARC-97. Though the technology of the active services has not been fully developed in this frequncy range, the heavy usage of this technology is expected in foreseeable future. To protect the passive services from spurious and out-of-band emissions of active services, realignment of the spectrum between 71 GHz and 275 GHz is strongly required. In addition, some effort should be made to allocate special bands for the radio astronomy service.