On 4/3/07, Ken Arck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 04:20 AM 4/3/2007, you wrote: > > >Go ahead, but please keep it on topic... > > > <----Well, I'll keep it simple for the moment and save the gory > details should they be needed. > > Essentially, the situation involves a 2 meter remote base on a UHF > system being used to "monitor" a regularly scheduled Saturday swap > net that is conducted on a non-related linked repeater system. The > remote base simply monitors one of the 2 meter repeaters of that system. > > One of the "owners" of the linked system demands that the 2 meter > remote base owner "cease and desist" because he doesn't have > "permission" to rebroadcast the net and to do so is "illegal". > > The owner of the 2 meter remote base tells the linked system member > to go pound sand (in so many words) - there is nothing illegal about > using a remote base to monitor a linked system and that permission is > not needed. > > Who's right? > > Ken
After reading the replies, I think legally there's no problems here anywhere... But if you really want to create a firestorm on this topic, Ken... replace the words "remote base" with "cross-band radio" and watch a bunch of us come unglued. Legalities aside (most cross-band radios don't have CW ID's, and their owners don't ID them properly/legally and don't have full-duplex control of them)... Who here has had to go DF some idiots cross-band rig in his car that's locking up your entire repeater system with noise, while he's inside merrily doing something else, not paying attention to it? You could keep changing the wording around, to make the topic even more contentious... Change "remote base" to "unauthorized link"... and then depending on local coordination policy... Well, anyway... I gave up arguing all this stuff long ago. Someone points a cross-bander at our repeaters, ID's it properly and behaves, we don't say much... but our "official" stance is NO... because too many people have not had enough courtesy to read the manual for their rigs, and/or a band plan over the years. A case of "one bad apple spoils the bunch", but it's been a lot more than one bad apple... Cross-band radios, remote bases, whatever... mostly they're more of a pain in the butt for the originating repeater owner/operator than they ever are for the remote base/crossband radio owner... because people don't use them correctly. So legally, I bet you're good... ethically, you're crossing a wide obscure line where so many repeater owner/operators have been burned by idiots, that you run the risk of instantly getting people's hackles up. Example: Even though our policy is NO, there's a repeater owner south of our area that links his 900 MHz machine to our LINK FREQUENCY (he's figured out it's a hub) regularly. Nice, huh? We asked him to formalize the relationship and send us command codes (not that we could hit his repeater) to take it down if it ever causes problems on our HUB, and... no reply. Fine... whatever. That's the kind of stuff that will drive you crazy when trying to run a clean well-engineered system... waste of time. In that case above, the link has never caused us any problems, but there's always "someday"... and it'd be on the HUB for goodness sakes. Not cool... to use Ken's original topic subject. I'm sure in this case, Ken's remote base works fine, he has complete control over it, and the other repeater owner has probably just had (multiple) bad experiences with same. It gets old re-explaining every year to some idiot that they need to put a CTCSS tone on the receiver side of their cross-bander. It also gets old hearing your repeater come out on someone's UHF input because some idiot with a cross-bander put it there, not bothering to read or understand a bandplan... Basically my opinion is, if you don't have full-duplex control of it (Ken does) and/or don't have a bleeding clue what full-duplex control is... keep it off of my group's repeater inputs and link frequencies. And if you're going to put it there, send us a note (yeah, real paper) explaining what it is, what you're doing, and how WE can turn it off if you screw it up. But I'm a softie at heart and don't go screaming at people about it if something's there... the Golden Rule applies... don't bother me, I won't bother you, kind of thing. No time to hunt the few doofuses that do it a year, anyway -- let alone spend hours on the phone "educating" people how to do it properly. But anyway, a lot of this revolves around what your purpose is -- these folks badgering Ken (well, there's two sides to every story, but we'll call it badgering for now since there are other people mentioning it here) sound like their motivation is not to keep their radio system clean/legal (or they misunderstand the legalities), but it's to keep people tuning only to them... and that's not in the spirit of things, really... Nate WY0X
