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BE INFORMED NO. 46
Some Things about Repeaters That You May Not Know How many here were licensed amateur operators during some or all of the period 1968 to 1973? Those who were, please recall with me those formative days when repeaters were just beginning to capture the attention of hams everywhere. The rest of you will just have to take our word for it; there really was a time when there were no repeaters. We have a lot of hams to thank for making our infrastructure of some 20,000 repeaters possible, including your fabulous repeaters. Thank you for being there in the thick of it from the very beginning with your helpful participation and thoughtful suggestions. You have proven that repeaters can be highly beneficial to our American public. For me it began in 1971 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I was very active in DXing and contesting. At a meeting of our local Penn Wireless Association, there was a proposal that the Club sponsor a 2-meter FM repeater. That was at a time when FM transceivers were just starting to appear in our ham radio stores. For the most part, however, they were do-it-yourself projects. My first 2-meter FM rig was a modified Motorola HT-220. The surplus circuit board came from Art Householder. The case and other parts were obtained from a service center and 6 sets of crystals from International. Joe Handley helped get it working. The club asked me to look into the regulations for repeaters. I reported back that Part 97, at least, didn't mention them; whereupon, I was loaned several copies of FM magazine. They contained articles on what the authors presumed - mistakenly - to be FCC rules. Little did I suspect that I was having a glimpse of my immediate future at the FCC and the reason we are all here today.
 How did I get that job? My background was 20 years in engineering R&D projects, primarily with RCA and GE. While in D.C., I paid a visit to the FCC Personnel Office with a copy of my resume. As I was scanning the job postings, a gentleman asked me to step into a vacant office. He said, "I work for the government, but not for the FCC. I am here on a special assignment. This agency has some real personnel problems. They need people with your experience. But, you're not going to get a job by just answering job postings. Those positions will probably go to people already here." He handed me an organization chart and advised: "Study this chart carefully and decide where you want to work. Then, contact the chief of that Bureau and explain how you can help. He is the one that will make the hiring decision." After sending a one-page letter to the Chief of the Safety and Special Radio Services Bureau, I received a reply inviting me to come in for an interview with Prose Walker, Chief of the Amateur and Citizens Division. A lot of hams have assumed that I knew Prose and got the job through him. But we had never met until that meeting. Apparently, he was impressed that I was one of the very few who had obtained an Amateur Extra Class operator license before incentive licensing hit. He asked: "How would you like Bill Grenfeld's former job as Chief of the Rules Branch? Rulemaking has been at a standstill there ever since Bill retired a couple years ago. There is a Report and Order about ham repeaters way overdue and there is a backlog of another 100 petitions." Before fully accepting me, however, I had to pass his Morse code test; and it was not your measly 20 words-per-minutes. And it was no 5-minute run. It was a live over-the-air QSO on 40 meters. Although my Rules Branch consisted of three attorneys and two engineers, Prose set as my personal assignment the drafting of that overdue Report and Order in Docket 18803 concerning the licensing and operation of repeaters. In February 1970, the FCC Commissioners had adopted the Notice of Propose Rule Making, based upon petitions filed by three parties: the Buffalo Amateur Radio Repeater Association; the Texas State Division of Defense and Disaster Relief; and three hams filing jointly. It proposed authorizing repeaters on VHF and above. For 2-meters, there would be two sub-bands for ten FM channels split 600 kHz. Automatic station identification every three minutes; 600 watts input maximum; no cross-banding; and no chain repeaters or multiple outputs. The thousands of comments from the amateur service community filled several volumes. No two of them, however, seemed to be in agreement. That was when I first came to better understand the nature of our amateur service community: while we do a pretty fair job of coming together when fighting off a threat to our radio service, we too often fall apart when it comes to arriving at a consensus concerning contentious internal issues. That must be why we traditionally appeal to the FCC to make decisions for us. We just can't seem to get enough of those restrictive rules. Whenever the FCC does become involved, moreover, it tends to adopt a compromise. That usually infuriates everyone because no one gets exactly what they wanted. We would be so much better off if we could function even if Part 97 were to be stripped of everything but the frequency tables and our Golden Rule: Each amateur station must be operated in accordance with good engineering and good amateur practice. Prose recognized correctly that the amateur service community was missing one of the basic tenets for numerous stations transmitting with channelized technology 24-7 within the same band. There must be effective channel coordination. But no one was stepping forward with such a plan. So, how large was the repeater movement going to be? We asked that question of everyone claiming expertise. Their answers were all over the place. Some predicted it would be short bubble, much as was the 10-meter FM movement in the post-war 1940s. The typical guess was around 500. Based upon that short-sighted number, it appeared that there would be enough 2-meter spectra to accommodate everyone who wanted a repeater channel pair 24/7. The coordination approach, therefore, was to simply confine every repeater to local coverage through regulation of transmitter power according to antenna height above average terrain. The limits were based upon propagation data for broadcast television coverage. It soon became evident that those predictions were extremely under-estimated. In some areas at least, channels would be in short supply. With no national coordinator stepping forward, the present system for self-coordination was adopted. It is up to the hams in each area to decide who their local coordinator is to be. It seems to be working endurably well. Numerous hams have appealed - without success - for the FCC to step in and overrule their local coordinator. Let's hope it never decides to do that. It would mean that the FCC had lost confidence in our ability to manage our own affairs.
 In my BE Informed No. 30, GEPS and GAPS on my website, is a running list of good engineering and good amateur practices. It includes two good amateur practices for repeaters: every auxiliary station and every repeater should be coordinated and all repeater providers and users should participate actively in selecting the entity to do the coordinating for their area. The regulatory model for Part 97 at that time was primarily one-on-one CW and AM intercommunications. It was hardly the ideal platform in which to codify special rules for the accommodations that your complex repeaters, auxiliary stations, satellites, message forwarding and the like require. So, the result was a patchwork of rule band-aids. A complete re-write was another ten years off, enabled greatly by the availability of personal computers and word processing. Docket 18803 was a contentious proceeding because it resolved a number of issues that were tolerably ignorable until repeaters came along. Then they had to be addressed. In particular, the exact duties of the station licensee and those of the station control operator were pinned down. The requirements for remote control were relocated from application showings, boiled down and codified into the rules. Among the many hams who were exceptionally effective in bringing the new rules on-line, four come to mind immediately. First, there was the ham who phoned me within my first hour on the job: He offered to help in any way that he could. His offer was accepted. He was hired to assist hams with their repeater applications. Gary Hendrickson W3DTN was the right guy at the right time. There was Dick McKay K6VGP, an airline pilot who has repeaters on Mount Wilson. He was flying a stretch DC-8 from Los Angeles to Baltimore. During his layovers, he often visited my office. Dick offered to publish in a southern California radio club newsletter the information hams needed to successfully file for a repeater license. Some of you might know that Dick was an irregular on the Mickey Mouse Club TV show. His mother was the movie actress Wanda McKay. She was in some 35 films in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. I have four of them in my DVD collection. There was Wayne Green who spotted Dick's articles and made them more widely available in 73 magazine. That got the ball really rolling. There was Lew McCoy, who subsequently did the same thing in QST. Lew was one of my very closest ham friends even before I went with the FCC - and remained so until he became one of our most honored silent keys. When Prose retired, I became the Division Chief - the last person to hold that job. The Division had become overly large. Our ham radio population had increased three-fold. Personal Radio was growing dramatically. We had responsibility for administering the rules, licensing and public information for three rule parts. That work has now been re-distributed among several divisions within the current FCC. There are many interesting stories about Prose. Here's one that I know first hand. Early on, one of our attorneys had drafted a response to an inquiry about third party participation. Prose refused to sign the letter. Now what I didn't know at the time was that Prose had recently hosted a foreign ham at his station. The ham was from a country with which the United States had neither reciprocal operating nor third party traffic agreements. Prose, however, had allowed the ham to use the station to talk back home. So, although I was still in my probationary period, I agreed with the attorney. Prose wasn't very pleased with that and said we would take the matter to the Bureau Chief's staff meeting. He directed me to prepare a presentation. For that, I first laid out both sides of the issue in a handout. But that format was scrapped because the Bureau Chief might read ahead of me and skip the buildup. Then I prepared a set of overhead viewgraphs. But that would mean setting up equipment and taking a chance on the bulb burning out. Not good. I finally settled on the old reliable flip charts. When the big day arrived, I entered the Bureau Chief's office trying not to notice the icy stares of the dozen or so staff members in attendance. After all, I was the outsider who hadn't come up through the FCC ranks. When it came my turn, I stood and began speaking. After a few charts, however, I noticed that the Bureau Chief's eyes were closed. In fact, he appeared to be asleep. That was affirmed when he started to snore. What to do? Here I was, making a potentially career-defining presentation to a man who was obviously sound asleep. Should I suspend talking until he woke up? I glanced around the room in hopes of picking up a hint. Everyone, however, was staring upward, apparently counting the number of ceiling tiles. So, I just kept on going. When I finished, he immediately came back to life by announcing that he agreed with me: That non-FCC-licensed foreigner could only be either a third party or a reciprocal operator. When that Bureau Chief retired, his replacement was Charlie Higginbotham from the Land Mobile Division. Initially, he was very uncomfortable with regulating only stations and operators rather than complete systems. He was also puzzled that - unlike land mobile - there was no one clamoring to be the national frequency coordinator. One of the first questions that he asked me was about how many ham repeaters there were in the DC area. There were then about thirty, including yours. Then, he asked me how many of them I could use. I said that my station could access them all. That answer didn't fit into the traditional one or two-channel "base & three" land mobile system model that he had in mind. He said, "Buying 30 sets of crystals must have wiped out your bank account." I answered that I didn't use crystals; I had a synthesizer. How many remember the GLB synthesizer? It had a series of switches for dialing in the channels. I had built one and, with the help of Mike Cox K3GEG, had gotten it working nicely with a land mobile transceiver that I had obtained from Joe Schaap K4IWF. "I hope your synthesizer really works," Charlie remarked, "Frequency agility would solve so many interference issues in land mobile. But the manufacturers are adamant that synthesizers will not work for VHF. I am coming out to your station to see for myself." For that, I lined up another ham, an attorney who worked in the Bureau, for a schedule on 2-meters. He also had a synthesized rig. To demonstrate, we agreed to start out on one simplex channel, and then take turns calling out at random and switching to another channel. Our demonstration worked flawlessly. Charlie was astounded: "What you have there is the way to resolve quickly all of the co- and adjacent-channel interference issues that they have in land mobile. Why, trunking may even become practical sooner than we thought!" There have been many subsequent proceedings to smooth out our repeater rules. You have advanced technology dramatically and demonstrated how it can be applied in innovative ways for the public benefit. Now that cellular telephones have taken most of the non-ham autopatch load, we've come to appreciate that our beloved 2-meter repeaters are the central gathering place in every locality. It is the way to plug into that unique wealth of knowledge and ingenuity that characterizes our amateur service community. As popular as repeaters are, however, hams are not of a mind to turn the entire band over them. Ham radio has traditionally been the place where very creative people come along unexpectedly and apply technology in ways most of us can't even begin to imagine. We anticipate that even more wondrous systems will be making their appearances somewhere down the log. Not only did I step into the shoes of Bill Grenfell at the FCC, I also stepped into his shoes upon our retirements. Betty also worked for the FCC. She was in enforcement with Riley Hollingsworth and two other attorneys for 25 years. Bill had started the RULES & REGS column in our Autocall Magazine. His columns were subsequently syndicated in WorldRadio and The QCWA JOURNAL. I took over the writing of those columns from Jack Kelleher. WorldRadio has been acquired by CQ Magazine and is now available free-of-charge on-line. Although Autocall is no longer being published, Spark Gap Times and our QCWA Chesapeake Chapter No. 20 Newsletter have joined the syndication. Over 175 such columns have been published. In effect, I take your toughest exams every day. My answers are graded by our entire amateur service community. Additionally, I maintain a non-commercial website at http://www.w3beinformed.org/ where you can obtain information free and be linked to a number of other interesting amateur radio websites. All of the questions that have been answered in my columns about remote base, repeater and other systems have been compiled into BE Informed No. 45. Folks, that is all that I have to say today about repeaters that you may not have known. If you have a question about the FCC rules for our amateur service, please e-mail me at john@johnston.net or w3be@arrl.net. Thank you for your fantastic repeaters. Enter content here |
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