You have hit the nail on the head with the use of "emergency service" as a simple justification for non-emergency use.
There is a COST to the use of amateur spectrum, primarily, time denied to others. However, since there is no physical cost to automatic stations, they have no incentive to implement spectrum efficient operations. Here is what I think is a good "thought excercise". What if automatic wide bandwidth stations had to pay an annual lease of say $20,000 per kilohertz to become "primary" users. They could deduct time spent actually sending emcomm messages or for participating in monthly drills. Regular day to day usage would NOT be considered "exercising" the emergency capability. Additional stations using the same frequency could be added for an additional $500 per year. What would happen under these conditions? The first thing you would see is winlink throwing away pactor 3. As has been pointed out in other messages, pactor 3 is only 30% faster in most cases than pactor 2 yet is 500% wider. The economics just wouldn't support using pactor 3. The second thing you would see is a design for multiple stations using the same bandwidth, ala packet. Granted there would be a throughput hit, ala packet, since complete addressing would be needed in each packet for routing purposes. However, the COST would be minimized by doing so. Last, you would see an emphasis placed on minimizing the data sent/received per message. No more Microsoft Word documents with three lines, just simple text based messages. No more 300 kilobyte radar pictures of the weather, just simple 1 kilobyte text based forecasts. In the end, since amateur spectrum is FREE, there is no incentive to create efficient operations. Since most of these systems/stations are concentrating on third party traffic, rather than ham to ham communications, spectrum efficiency should be THE primary goal. By limiting the allowed spectrum for wide bandwidth automatic stations, these incentives are artificially created. In order to justify more space, the whining about emergency communications needs to be replaced with some documented facts about how the systems have been designed/modified for greater and greater spectrum efficiency to the point that no further economic gains can be had. Otherwise, do like the rest of the worlds amateur operators and only operate when space is available. Jim WA0LYK --- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, "Alan Tindal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I entirely agree with you Roger, the "emergency service" is only an > attempt to justify the automatic operations. > In my opinion all amateur un-attended automatic operation should be > banned world wide. The rest of the world's amateurs shouldn't have to > suffer this sort of behaviour just for a few. > I have always been under the impression that amateur radio was > something you did with the radio, not wander off & do the shopping or > take the dog for a walk while the radio does its own thing. > > Automatic operation might be essential to HF emcomm but is emcomm > essential, I think not. > > Alan G3VLQ >
