On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 08:39:52PM -0700, J. Moen wrote: > Regarding the US -- since the coordinating bodies do give out > coordinations, and Part 97 says any interference between a coordinated and > uncoordinated repeater must primarily be resolved by the latter, these > bodies do have a lot of power.
Nowhere near as much as you may think. Don't forget that coordination organizations are run by volunteers in their spare time, with little to no ability to absorb the costs involved in a lawsuit. Even if the suit is groundless, it could still destroy the organization, and reach into the coordinator's personal pocket. Coordinators are also not appointed, supported, or recognized by the FCC. Anyone can be a coordinator if they get the support of the amateur community. A coordinator has *zero* power to tell someone to get off the air. The entire extent of its involvement is if the FCC asks it who's coordinated. The FCC, *if* there's harmful interference, *then* tells the uncoordinated party to fix the interference. If there's no interference, *nobody gets shut down*. In the end, coordination is not a technical job. It's a political one. As long as there is no formal support for coordinators, and full exposure to legal liability, it will remain so. > I don't forsee any substantive changes to Part 97 regarding frequency > coordination, so improvements will have to come from the coordination > organizations. In some regions, these are led by forward thinking people > (I'm betting you are one of them) who encourage better use of the spectrum > they manage -- and that doesn't necessarily mean they support digital > voice or D-Star, but they do educate and lead their repeater operators to > look at the bigger issues and encourage ways to maximize use of that > spectrum, while at the same time, developing a viable transition process > that existing repeater operators can live with. Speaking personally, I believe D-Star is the future of amateur radio for the niche that analog VHF/UHF-FM currently occupies, for a host of reasons. The Minnesota Repeater Council does all it can to encourage its adoption. It also has changed, in the last several months, to a coordination process based purely on coverage modeling. We think this will allow more repeaters to be placed on the bands, in holes in coverage that were previously blocked by repeaters a long way away that didn't cover the area that it was protected in. But the D-Star community can help, too. Is 2 meters full? Then DON'T PUT UP A 2-METER BOX! Pretty much every D-Star radio these days is a dual bander. The few single-banders are all first-generation and a pain to use, and the D-Star community has long recommended that people not use them anyway. Given that, what difference does it make whether the repeater is on 2 or 440? > But I think that's where the game has to be played here in the US. I agree. Just remember that the coordinators can't just wave a magic wand and make existing systems go away. Only the FCC can do that. -- Jay Maynard, K5ZC at K6ZC port B http://www.conmicro.com http://www.k6zc.org http://www.tronguy.net http://jmaynard.livejournal.com (Yes, that's me!) http://www.hercules-390.org
