Woodrick, Ed wrote: > In other words, the FCC's implementation of regional authorities have > moved Amateur Radio frequency coordination from being a mess into a much > more evolved mess.
Got any better ideas? > We are pretty much stuck in the world of 30 year old FM repeaters with > no desire or incentive to be more efficient players in the spectrum. Around here, we're in transition. The coordination body made room for digital/narrowband technology in the UHF and higher bands, but VHF is stuffed full. One group has a VHF allocation in the works, and we have no current VHF backlog, but there's more coming. VHF will be the place where some difficult decisions have to be made if digital/narrowband folks really need VHF. Most digital technolgies out there today work fine on UHF, so it may be a moot point. The main "pusher" of VHF will be groups that buy repeaters before knowing if they have a frequency to use them on. Having a VHF D-STAR module in hand and nowhere to put it, is kinda silly. We know of one group that is going to be in this situation because the module was donated to them... with careful location of their machine and particular attention taken to coverage area, they might be able to be wedged into current VHF allocations... no one's quite sure yet how that will work out. Including them. Two or three groups have gotten digital coordinations or are in the process of doing so in the "segment" of the bands we carved out for digital/narrowband. (I keep using the phrase "digital" because they're not all running D-STAR, and this is a D-STAR list.) I don't see anything stopping the repeater-builders or coordinators in our area from easily transitioning to narrowband technology if hams find it interesting/useful... if they do, some analog stuff will have to come off-air in the Denver metro area to make it work, but outside of Denver things are much more open. So in my mind the most important piece to keep a transition running smoothly is to have a PURPOSE for the D-STAR system. (Have I thought of one yet that's a "killer app" for it? Not really... but the features and technology to have a "killer app" are certainly there.) > Heck, I've got a single, extremely seldom used TV repeater that is > complaining that their 12 MHz worth of spectrum is getting invaded. The coordination body here refuesed to allocate 12 MHz for that purpose on UHF long ago... as you say, blocking 12 MHz of spectrum 100% of the time for a less than 1% system, isn't appropriate allocation of spectrum. The ATV'ers here operate on a non-interference basis. Works better that way. The coordinators also highly recommended that ATV move up to 1.2 GHz, if possible. Much easier to coordinate a repeater coordination there. Not sure what the ATV stuff has to do with D-STAR, though. We can drop this part of the discussion... It *appears* to me that most areas aren't really having a problem finding space for D-STAR, unless you live in the over-populated coastal cities. Nate WY0X
