FM and repeater co-ordinators be creative

Doing away with paper repeaters will help open up channel pairs in some geographic regions, but there are others where all the channels in all of the repeater subbands are truly in use. What do you do in those cases? The FCC's Bill Cross says to use a bit of good old ham radio ingenuity.

Cross said: "Coordinators can create more channels by, for example, requiring as a condition of coordination that the repeater that a narrower than 25 kHz bandwidth (on UHF) be used, that narrower guard bands be used or that a repeater not be installed on a mountaintop where it ties up a channel pair for half the area of a state,"

Cross also said that there are some instances where coordination is not necessary.

Cross: "Coordination only becomes relevant if there is interference. If you can find a channel that is unused, the rules permit you to put a repeater on it. If the repeater is coordinated to a closed repeater and you can use it without causing interference (to that closed repeater), you may. Coordination does not establish a squatters right to a frequency or a right to exclude others.

Does this mean that the FCC wants to put an end to closed and private repeaters? Well, not really. When questioned about that remark by someone in the audience, Cross went back to the FCC rules and found:

Cross: "Its 97.205(e). Limiting the use of a repeater to only certain user stations is permissible. Now you will not find the term closed repeater anywhere in Part 97. Thats a term that you have developed. This rule was adopted at the request of the amateur community so that a repeater owner, operator or control operator would be able to tell a particular licensee to stay off the repeater.

"Usually, our experience has been that comes as a last resort with someone whose just misbehaving and carrying on baiting people. Making unidentified transmissions and other thing that are in the category of totally obnoxious. And as a group or club, they don't want that person on the repeater. So, in the rule making proceeding the comments came in and said that we need to be able to have some kind of authority to tell someone to stay off the repeater. This rule gives you that authority."

What appears evident is that there is a very sharp difference of opinion between the way the ham community views closed and private repeaters and the legalistic approach of the FCC.

The FCC views 97.205(e) as an enforcement tool. Those who have run closed and private repeaters long before that rule came about, or those who want to establish one now, have seized on it to justify their exclusivity of a chosen user base. And it is quite likely that trying to prove that this rule does not codify closed and private repeaters would lead to a very costly federal court fight between opposing repeater owner operators. A legal battle that would make a few lawyers rather wealthy and likely bankrupt everyone else involved.

Also, thumbing through a recent ARRL Repeater Directory shows that with the exception of 440 MHz in Southern California, that nationally closed and private repeaters make up only about 1 or 2 percent of all the nations machines. So while the concept of closed and private repeaters is a hot button topic with many hams, the reality is that their impact on channel space availability is minimal at best.

Source: ARNewsline