Time to do away with paper repeaters

Is the FCC telling the coordination community that its time for them to act against paper repeaters?

We are talking about repeaters that have been co-ordinated to a channel pair but have never come on the air. Or repeaters that were once operational but have been silent for a long time.

Speaking at the recent Dayton Hamvention, it appears as if the FCC's Bill Cross, W3TN, has challenged the nation's co-ordination community to make the paper repeaters go away.

Cross said: "Co-ordinators also need to be sure that the systems that they have co-ordinated are still using the channels before they tell you that your system cannot be co-ordinated. From what I have heard, in some areas of the country there are an awful lot of paper repeaters and an awful lot of out of date co-ordination's."

One of the reasons that paper repeaters exist at all has been the fear on the part of co-ordinators of being sued by the person holding the channel allocation whether a repeater exists or not. This, if they pull a co-ordination and give the channel pair to the next group waiting in line.

For those unaware, those hams providing repeater co-ordination services are volunteers. Up until now they have not been willing to risk their homes and life savings just to make the point before a judge and jury that they have the power to tell the owner of a non existent repeater to go away. Now however, Bill Cross words might be the impetus to start changing this.

Source: ARNewsline