Fall 2004 Issue

FM

FM/Repeaters—Inside Amateur Radio’s “Utility” Mode

Tone Deaf

 By Gary Pearce, KN4AQ

The SouthEastern Repeater Association (SERA) coordinators at their summer 2004 board of directors meeting.

I think that the SouthEastern Repeater Association (SERA) Board of Directors really didn’t anticipate the storm of protest that developed in June when it voted to require tone on all repeaters in its eight-state coordination area. However, that’s just what happened—on the air, on message boards such as QRZ.com and eHam.net, and in e-mail and phone calls to SERA officers. The announcement touched a nerve that has been lying close to the surface for years. The furor caused SERA President Roger Gregory, W4RWG, to attend the big Shelby, North Carolina hamfest “incognito,” not wearing his distinctive red SERA shirt and not spending time at the SERA booth. The tactic didn’t work. Angry hams found Roger in the flea market and gave him an earful. As this issue of CQ VHF is being prepared, SERA is reconsidering the decision, as I’ll explain below.

SERA is the frequency coordination body for amateur radio repeaters in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and West Virginia. At its semi-annual meeting near Knoxville, Tennessee last June, Mississippi Director Steve Grantham, AA5SG, was discussing the FCC proposal to permit auxiliary stations to operate on 2 and 6 meters. SERA expects that plan could increase the number of stations using repeater inputs to link IRLP, Echolink, and other VoIP networked computers to local repeaters as hams take the easy way and just connect the computer to their base-station radio. That, in turn, could increase the problems with interference to co-channel neighbors, especially during band openings. (See details on the proposal later in this column.)

That was the immediate catalyst for Steve’s motion to “require the use of CTCSS/DCS on both transmit and receive on all new FM voice repeater coordinations, effective June 13, 2004” and extend the requirement to all existing repeaters by July 2006. It surely wasn’t the only reason for SERA to consider the policy. With more and more repeaters going on the air, more repeater owners are complaining about signals from users of their co-channel neighbors appearing on their inputs. They’re also complaining about their users hearing the co-channel neighbor repeater’s output as they drive around town. They want the frequency coordinators to “do something” about it. It seems that some repeater owners actually expect to be able to operate on a completely clear frequency except maybe in the wider band openings. That may be what was really on the minds of the coordinators when they voted unanimously to pass Steve’s motion. You may notice that I’m trying hard to avoid using the word “interference.”

Although the vote was unanimous, some directors were not present at the meeting and later indicated that they would not have voted for the motion. Also, among the staff at the meeting not all were totally pro-tone. Tim Berry, WB4GBI, an assistant director in Tennessee who owns several carrier-access repeaters, noted that tone doesn’t really solve problems; it just masks them. He also pointed out the effort and expense some repeater owners would face to add tone to their machines. I added that from the user’s perspective, tone was “traveler hostile,” making repeaters difficult for hams to use while on the road away from home. For the most part, though, the SERA staff felt the time had come to actively encourage the use of tone to reduce the problem of annoying, weak signals from co-channel neighbors.
 

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