Thanks Bonnie, what about the concept of listen first and making sure the
frequency is not occupied? Is there any USA exclusion from this
requirement? If I us a timer on my rig to send my call sign over the air
and simply say K3UK once an hour, are there any segments I can do this
without having to listen first ? Can a packet station like Propnet transmit
without a listen first concept? Perhaps not under 30 Mhz ?
Andy K3UK
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:35 PM, expeditionradio
expeditionra...@yahoo.comwrote:
Phil Williams ka1...@... wrote:
Who can talk about what they have seen when
it comes to best practices when
operating an unatteneded on the HF bands?
Hi Phil,
Unattended operation of ham stations isn't
appropriate to describe HF operating methods
in USA, as far as I am aware of it.
However, unattended is a description used
within the IARU bandplans for certain segments
of bands. The term is not very well-defined, but
the IARU Region 1 bandplan committee started using
it some years ago, and it has somehow been carried
over to other bandplans, without much explanation.
A licensed operator in USA must always be in control
of the station, attending to it to be sure it
complies with the rules. There are many means that
can be used by the licensed operator to control the
station and keep it in compliance with FCC rules,
including: manual, remote, and several automatic
types of control of operation. There is a long
history of automatic control for various types of
stations, including repeaters, telemetry, data, and
beacons. The first automatic data stations on HF
were probably RTTY autostart stations... then later
on the APRS and Packet systems. Today, we have many
many different types of automatically controlled
HF stations on the air. There is something happening
with an HF automatically controlled data station,
every few minutes, every day on every HF band. The
automatically controlled data networks form the most
dependable emergency HF systems that ham radio has
developed so far.
73 Bonnie VR2/KQ6XA
