Every call sign comes with history. Most of W2ZB’s is on The Call: a New Jersey operator on the air from 1920 into the 1980s, then twenty-eight years in Georgia with a close relative who claimed it in 1996. This post is about something that happened to that second holder seven years before he held W2ZB. The call itself had nothing to do with it. I’m including it because it’s a strange and well-documented piece of amateur radio history, and it’s part of the story of the people who carried this call.
Everything here comes from one public court record. Where the record is silent, so am I.
The job
In 1989, George F. Arsics Jr. worked for the Federal Communications Commission at its monitoring station in Powder Springs, Georgia. According to the court, one of his responsibilities was to monitor radio stations for compliance with FCC regulations. He was also a ham.
October 4, 1989
That day, FCC officials at Powder Springs were sent to respond to a complaint about deliberate interference on a certain radio frequency. They recorded the transmissions and tracked the signal to Arsics’ home.
He let them in. He told them he had been listening to the frequency but had not been transmitting on it. The recordings showed that he had been transmitting.
The case
On October 13, 1989, the FCC proposed to remove him on three charges: violating FCC rules, conduct that hurt the efficiency of the service, and deliberately misrepresenting or withholding facts during an official FCC investigation. He was removed on December 13, 1989.
With his union, the National Treasury Employees Union, he took the removal to an arbitrator. On September 8, 1990, the arbitrator found that he had violated FCC rules and that his conduct had hurt the efficiency of the service. She dismissed the misrepresentation charge under an earlier Federal Circuit case, and after weighing the standard factors for federal discipline, cut the penalty from removal to a 30-day suspension.
The Office of Personnel Management asked her to reconsider. On December 18, 1990, she kept her decision, finding that even if the misrepresentation charge had stood, the FCC had not properly weighed those factors.
OPM then asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to review the case. On March 26, 1991, the court declined. It said OPM hadn’t shown the ruling would substantially affect the civil service, and that the penalty was a judgment call tied to the facts, “precisely the type of issue which OPM should not petition for review.” The court later declined a rehearing, on July 12, 1991. The 30-day suspension stood.
It’s worth being precise about what that means. The court didn’t rule on what happened on October 4. It only decided not to take the case. The findings about what happened are the arbitrator’s, as the court summarized them.
A postscript in Monitoring Times
In April 1991, a few weeks after the court’s order, Monitoring Times ran a short reader item: a law student was collecting accounts for a thesis and asked readers to write in “if the FCC has ever violated your constitutional rights.” The student was George F. Arsics Jr. of Powder Springs. The magazine’s columnist noticed the town name too.
What the record doesn’t say
The court’s order doesn’t name the frequency, the band, what was transmitted, or who complained. Stories about this case still circulate on the air and online, some with very specific details. I haven’t found a source that supports them, so they aren’t here.
And then W2ZB
Five years later, in 1996, Arsics claimed W2ZB as a close relative of its first holder, John George Arsics of New Jersey. He held it for twenty-eight years, renewing it in 2006 and 2016, until the license was cancelled in October 2024. Two years later it came back to New Jersey. That part of the story is its own post.
I’ve written this as history, not judgment. If you knew him, or have something to correct or add, I’d like to hear from you: [email protected].
Sources
- Newman v. Arsics, 932 F.2d 980 (Fed. Cir. 1991) (unpublished order, Misc. No. 301): law.resource.org
- Monitoring Times, April 1991, via World Radio History: www.worldradiohistory.com
- W2ZB license data, FCC Universal Licensing System, and the Radio Amateur Callbook (see The Call for links).