WD7F - John in Tucson wrote: > Popcorn is what we call it, and we can see what appears to be spread > spectrum pulses on the scope. A couple years ago, it would be on during the > day and off at night and weekends. Now it's 24/7 and getting stronger. > And, I miss-spoke, it's 420 - 450 as you said. > > At least you give me a little hope with your comments and if I can find that > friendly someone and buy him (her) a beer, I might do some good.
Similar "friendly" things happened in Colorado. It took a while for the people in charge to understand that every ham UHF repeater was "announcing" whenever their EPLRS system was active. Once they realized they were "giving away important intelligence" about when they were conducting operations -- they moved on down the band. The system is supposedly very agile and easily re-programmed. As best as we could tell, these systems were just sent out with putting them in the ham repeater inputs as SOP. We hams aren't helping any by having some areas low-out/high-in, and vice-versa... they can't write a good SOP to avoid us. But, a little programming on their part after that, and poof, no more "woodpecker" sounds on all the ham repeater inputs. http://www.natetech.com/files/EPLRSNoise.wav That's what it sounded like here. The "your showing your hand" tactic... "Do you guys know that when you leave that portion of the band in your transmitter, all the hams can hear when you're active and when you're not, and that anyone with a scanner can figure it out too?" That idea will only work if they're shutting it down in-between missions like the one out here was doing... so it would come and go whenever they'd go active. We could always tell when they started and stopped a mission, which was probably not a good thing, in the big picture. Nate WY0X
