Please see below... Walt/K5YFW -----Original Message----- From: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of jgorman01 Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 9:36 PM To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com Subject: [digitalradio] Re: USA: No Advanced Digital HF Data Comms
Your argument isn't logical. Right, its political. IMHO the FCC has become a political agency rather than a regulatory agency. As you may be aware, there is a big frap in the FCC now concerning voting on the AT&T Southern Bell merger. This is political NOT technical or regulatory. If the NGO's don't have the resources to use the frequencies they currently have assigned, where would the resources come from to allow them to use amateur service frequencies reassigned to the land fixed/mobile service? How would they convince the FCC to allocate and assign new frequencies when they aren't using the ones they have? Its not a resource problem, it is a problem that being basically in the LMRS their assigned "channels" will not permit they type of modulation that is/would be required for high speed, robust data transmissions. Money is not really a problem, and of course if they are on NGO assigned frequencies, no radio operator's license is needed. The FCC may not have a choice to assign new frequencies or even create a new type of service...Congress may pass a Public Law establishing it. Of the FCC might create a new type of service or sub-service as they have done in the past. The ITU controls the segments assigned to different services. For example, 3750 - 4000 kHz in Region 2 can be amateur, land, or aeronautical. The FCC just can't create a new "service" for this segment without agreement of the signatories of the ITU. Therefore, these frequencies would have to be assigned within the land fixed/mobile service and end up with the same restriction that their current assignments have. If 3750-4000 can be used for land services, then the FCC could establish a sub-class or new land mobile radio class here for disaster communications. The FCC just recently did away with a sub-class with they effectively did away with RACES. You might have a Radio Amateur Disaster Communications Service with assigned frequencies in the ham bands and these frequencies might be only used exclusively by NGOs during disasters with the modes needed and operated by "certified" amateur radio operators or even non-amateur radio persons who were "certified". This was done during WWII. Lastly, I just can't understand where so much data is going to come from in a disaster that the FCC could justify moving HF amateur allocations to land fixed/mobile. Amateur radio should not be the primary service that handles megabytes/gigabytes of data on a continuous basis for logistics, etc. for NGO's or the government. This is close to the line of using amateur radio as a full blown communications carrier. If amateurs involved with emcomms are "selling" this to NGO's and the government they are doing so without consulting with all the other amateur service licensees that share these frequencies and getting their agreement. If you worked in a NGO Incident Command Post for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Baptist Disaster Relief for FEMA Incident Command Post, you would know just how much information is needed to run these facilities so that they can meet the collective needs of the disaster area. Part of the problem we saw in Katrina and Rita, and now looking back at other disaster events, we see that even in them they could have run better, more effectively and met the collective needs of those in the disaster area had information flow been large and faster. No one is selling the NGOs anything, they are NOT communications ignorant. But one thing for sure, even though we have a large number of amateur radio operators volunteering for disaster communications, the number is less than 15% of the number needed. Walt/K5YFW Jim WA0LYK --- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, "DuBose Walt Civ AETC CONS/LGCA" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Red Cross, Salvation Army and the like frequencies are just commercial frequencies requiring the same bandwidth as other users of the frequencies...they have no special frequencies. > > However, I would think that DHS would approach the FCC about setting aside disaster communications frequencies that don't reside within the commercial frequencies. What is unfortunate is that the ITU really controls the bandwidth of the frequencies on HF world wide so there is not really any or many available frequencies on HF that can be used for wideband use EXCEPT the hambands. Even our military frequencies that we in the U.S. (Region II) cannot be used in other parts of the world. > > The clostest thing we have to a disaster frequency is the 5 MHz frequency that is used in Alaska. When you consider the actual needs of frequencies set aside for disaster communications, there just isn't enough bandwidth available...what IS available is amateur radio frequencies. > > I fear that if amateur radio operators in the U.S. don't accommodate NGO HF communications needs...and choose to give the NGOs their own disaster frequencies, those frequencies will come out of the hambands. It may be a case of play with the NGOs and meet their "sometime" communications needs or lose frequencies to them altogether. > > Walt/K5YFW > Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to Telnet://cluster.dynalias.org Yahoo! Groups Links