On 8 September 2026 the ITU Radiocommunication Sector approved revised editions of three
propagation Recommendations. Eleven days later, on 19 September, the ITU pages that tell you
which edition is in force list none of them. That is not a website defect. It is where a
standards register quietly goes stale, and two revisions worth reading are sitting in the same
gap today.
What was approved, and what the pages say
Administrative Circular CACE/1206, dated 16 September 2026, is one page and an annex. It
records that three draft revised Recommendations were put through simultaneous adoption and
approval by correspondence under Circular CACE/1198 of 8 July 2026, and states, in the
circular's own words, "The conditions governing this procedure were met on 8 September 2026."
The annex gives the numbers and titles: P.372-18, radio noise; P.2041-1, path attenuation on
links between an airborne terminal and space; and P.311-20, the acquisition and presentation of
propagation data.
Now check the pages that a citation would point at. On 19 September 2026, the editions list for
P.372 gives P.372-17 (08/2024) as In force (Main) and shows no -18 at any status. P.311 gives
P.311-19 (11/2025). P.2041 gives P.2041-0 (09/2013), still under the older title, which says
airborne platform where the approved revision says airborne terminal. Three for three, eleven
days after approval.
The two ITU surfaces also disagree about their own dates. The circular index lists CACE/1206 as
2026-09-10. The circular's own first page is dated 16 September 2026. Where they differ, the
document is the record and the index is a listing.
None of this is misconduct, and the mechanism is not hidden. A Recommendation is approved first
and published after, and the editions page is a publications page. But the page does not say
that about itself. It says In force, which is a legal claim, on a date that is a publishing
fact. Anyone who builds a register by reading those pages, and that includes the standards
register BeamDesk publishes, which cites exactly those URLs, is reading a lagging indicator and
labelling it as current.
The leading indicator is free, public and needs no login: the administrative circular stream at
itu.int/md/R00-CACE-CIR-NNNN/en, with the PDF one path below it. Each circular names the
Recommendations in an annex. As of today the index tops out at CACE/1206, so nothing has been
approved since 8 September that this route would show.
A revision that adds a band, and drops a paragraph
Administrative Circular CACE/1203, dated 26 August 2026, covers Study Group 1 and is a step
earlier in the same procedure: two draft revisions adopted by the Study Group and sent to Member
States, who are asked to reply by 26 October 2026. One of the two is a draft revision of
Recommendation ITU-R SM.2151-0.
SM.2151 matters to anyone in power beaming because it is the only ITU-R Recommendation that
names frequency ranges for beam wireless power transmission. The 2022 text scopes itself to
wireless charging of mobile and portable devices and to powering sensor networks, explicitly not
electric vehicles, and its Table 1 lists four ranges: 915-921 MHz, 2 410-2 483.5/2 486 MHz,
5 725-5 875 MHz and 61-61.5 GHz. Its recognizing a) says plainly "that WPT has no status in the
RR".
The annex to CACE/1203 summarises what the revision does. Two items stand out. The first is an
addition: "added a new frequency range, 24.1-24.15 GHz, to Table 1 based on the completion of
impact studies in Report ITU-R SM.2505", with a new note beneath the table. That is a fifth band
named for beam WPT, and the study that justified it is the same Report whose 2026 revision added
a United States study at 24.1-24.15 GHz.
The second is a subtraction. The same annex records that the revision "removed ICNIRP and WHO
from the Abbreviations and Glossary section", because those acronyms were deleted from
considering g), and separately that it "deleted considering h)". In the 2022 text, considering
h) is the paragraph reading "that administrations wishing to introduce and bring into use beam
WPT applications should consider the exposure limits for non-ionizing electromagnetic fields".
The summary lists that paragraph as deleted, and lists the h) slot as refilled by the old
recognizing c), on the benefits of harmonised frequency ranges.
Be careful about how far that goes. The draft text itself is Document 1/85, restricted to ITU
members, so what is established here is what the public summary says: one deletion, and no
relocation named for it. The obligation may well reappear elsewhere in the revised text. The
summary does not say where, and I have not seen the draft.
It changes no exposure limit either way. Exposure limits do not come from SM.2151. ICNIRP's 2020
radiofrequency guidelines set a general public whole-body reference level of 10 W/m² incident
power density between 2 and 300 GHz, averaged over 30 minutes, and IEEE C95.1-2019 is the other
instrument a regulator will reach for. A Recommendation that drops a pointer to them does not
move either number. What it moves is what a spectrum administration reads when it first opens
the only ITU-R text naming bands for this technology.
One caveat that this site attaches every time the band comes up. The 5 725-5 875 MHz row is ISM
beam WPT between devices on the ground. 5.8 GHz is not regulatorily available for space-to-Earth
power transmission: there is no Article 21 space-to-Earth power flux-density row for it in the
Radio Regulations, Edition of 2024, and wireless power transmission has no status in the
Regulations at all.
The clutter model that is about to reach 5.8 GHz
Administrative Circular CACE/1205, dated 9 September 2026, is the Study Group 3 twin of the
above: one draft revision adopted, Member States asked to reply by 9 November 2026. It is a
revision of P.2108-1, "Prediction of clutter loss", and its annex is specific: "The revision
extends the lower frequency limit of the method from 10 GHz down to 500 MHz." The same annex
says the clutter loss distribution, today a function of elevation angle and frequency, becomes
additionally a function of ground station height and median clutter height.
The current text bounds that model tightly. Section 3.3 of Annex 1 in P.2108-1 covers the case
where one end of the path is inside man-made clutter and the other is a satellite, aeroplane or
other platform above the Earth, and states its validity as 10 to 100 GHz, elevation angles 0 to
90 degrees, applicable to urban and suburban environments. So today, for an Earth-space path at
5.8 GHz, the model does not apply. There is no ITU-R statistical clutter figure to cite. After
approval there would be one.
The magnitude is worth knowing before deciding whether to care. Evaluated at the model's own
lowest valid frequency, 10 GHz, for a 10 degree elevation angle and the median location,
equation (7) of P.2108-1 gives roughly 14 dB of clutter loss. That figure is an estimate
computed from the published equation, not a measurement, and it sits at the edge of the model's
stated range. At 5 degrees it is near 21 dB. Tens of decibels, in other words, for a terminal
low down among buildings and trees, falling away quickly as the elevation rises.
Here is the case against caring. This is a model of clutter loss on an interference path in
urban and suburban surroundings. The sites anyone would actually put a rectenna on are open
land, chosen precisely to have no clutter, and this revision does not change a power link
budget, a beam, or a safety case. What it changes is the arithmetic available to whoever has to
show that a ground station in a town neither causes nor suffers harmful interference, at a
frequency where that arithmetic currently has no ITU-R method at all.
How to read the stream
Approval by correspondence is a quiet procedure and its calendar is public. Two deadlines are
live now: 26 October 2026 for the SM.2151 revision, and 9 November 2026 for the P.2108
revision. In both cases Member States are asked to tell the Secretariat whether they approve,
the results are announced in a later circular, and the approved text is published after that.
The publication step is the one the editions pages report, and it is the last event in the
chain.
The practical consequence is small and worth doing. If you maintain a list of the editions you
cite, do not refresh it from the editions pages alone. Read the circular index, note the Study
Group and the annex, and treat a circular dated last week as better evidence than a publications
page dated today. It cost two fetches to establish everything above.
What would change my mind
Three things, and each is checkable by somebody other than me.
If the ITU's editions pages pick up P.372-18, P.311-20 and P.2041-1 within a day or two of
publication, and publication itself follows approval by a predictable interval, then the
complaint shrinks to a labelling matter: the page means published and says In force. I would
still want the page to say which it means, but "lagging indicator" would be the wrong phrase for
a queue that moves on schedule. The test is the next approval round.
If someone with ITU member access reads Document 1/85 and finds that the duty to consider
non-ionising exposure limits survives elsewhere in the revised SM.2151 text, then the second
section above is describing a tidy-up rather than a removal, and I would correct it. The public
summary is all I have, and a summary is not a text.
And if a Member State objects before 26 October, the SM.2151 revision does not enter into force
as adopted, in which case the band that is not yet in Table 1 stays out of it and the argument
about what the revision does becomes hypothetical. Objections are rare in this procedure. They
are not impossible.
Sources
https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/md/00/cace/cir/R00-CACE-CIR-1206!!PDF-E.pdf
https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/md/00/cace/cir/R00-CACE-CIR-1205!!PDF-E.pdf
https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/md/00/cace/cir/R00-CACE-CIR-1203!!PDF-E.pdf
https://www.itu.int/md/R00-CACE-CIR/en
https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-P.372/en
https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-P.311/en
https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-P.2041/en
https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-P.2108/en
https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/p/R-REC-P.2108-1-202109-I!!PDF-E.pdf
https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-SM.2151/en
https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/sm/R-REC-SM.2151-0-202209-I!!PDF-E.pdf
https://www.itu.int/pub/R-REP-SM.2505
https://www.itu.int/pub/R-REG-RR
https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/publications/ICNIRPrfgdl2020.pdf
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