Winter 2005 Issue

FM

The State of Frequency Coordination, Part 1

 By Gary Pearce, KN4AQ

Last year I spent a great deal of time trying to pull together the research I need to write a good column on the state of frequency coordination. I just haven’t been trying very hard to actually write it, though. Thus, I’ll get Part 1 started, and that may spur me on to buckle down and do Part 2 (and 3, 4, 5…). Maybe it will inspire a few of you to contribute your thoughts as well.

Part 1 is a short history of frequency coordination. I’ve been active on FM since the late 1960s. I was a teenager then, and the big wave of FM and repeaters of that era kind of washed over me. However, I did pay some attention, and by the late ’70s I found myself the frequency coordinator for northern Illinois, including the Chicago metro area. Sherman, set the Wayback for the early ’60s. …

Frequency coordination and its close cousin, band planning for VHF/UHF FM, are two of the big success stories in amateur radio—our generation’s version of crossing the Atlantic on HF. During the ’60s there was just a little FM/ repeater operation on ham radio, and before 1960 it pretty much didn’t exist at all. I was licensed in 1965, and 2 meters was fairly quiet around Chicago. A bunch of us operated AM just above 145.0 MHz. There were a few big-gun weak-signal ops on SSB and CW, a moonbouncer or two, and maybe two repeaters that were a secret well kept from most of the ham community.

In the ’60s the FCC changed some rules for commercial two-way radio users and put a lot of FM equipment on the surplus market, cheap. Hams, many of them two-way Techs, snapped them up, retuned them for ham frequencies, and started putting up repeaters.

We had a lot of totally vacant space on 2 meters, mostly between 146 and 148 MHz. The 30-MHz wide 70-cm band was almost completely empty. There was no band plan to tell the hams what frequencies to use for these FM rigs and the repeaters that followed them, but they needed some kind of organization, because the radios were crystal controlled, both transmit and receive, so no “tuning around” was possible. Frequency synthesizers were a decade away. This fixed-frequency use was a foreign concept to most hams, who equated it with CB, giving FM a bad rap from the beginning.

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