(PopularWireless.com) A member of the Personal Radio Association’s Enforcement Team for the State of Virginia found this parking-lot call box and several others like it broadcasting on General Mobile Radio Service frequency 462.575 MHz from a college campus. An official complaint was
filed with the FCC Enforcement Bureau office in Gettsyburg, PA. by the PRA after units were found in multiple campus locations.
Two of the call boxes attracted considerable attention after broadcasting recorded emergency announcements every few minutes, one after the other, twenty four hours per day for over a week in November 2007. The call boxes were heard from a considerable distance and did interfere with licensed GMRS users attempting to use their family’s repeater in the vicinity of the college. At least one of the boxes was off frequency tolerance as measured by a sophisticated two-way radio measuring instrument. Subsequent to filing the complaint the Commission contacted the college administration. Transmissions from the malfunctioning boxes ceased after that contact was made. The FCC is currently investigating.
The college had no FCC license to operate the call box transmitters on the GMRS frequency. These call boxes have manufacturer identification plates indicating the boxes are CALL24 brand, a division of RCS Wireless Technology. The identity of the company that sold and installed the boxes is not known to the PRA as of the date of this article.
General Mobile Radio Service frequencies require an FCC license. Organizations, companies, schools, or associations have been ineligible to license in the GMRS since 1989. Only individuals are eligible to license in the GMRS.
Schools are eligible to license such devices within a large pool (hundreds) of radio frequencies set aside for commercial or local government use. Obtaining the proper FCC license does require the expense of a frequency search and use of a frequency coordinator as well as an FCC license fee.
GMRS licensees share just eight repeater output frequencies. Across the USA GMRS licensees have found unlicensed use by commercial GMRS pirates as they were coined. Presumably unscrupulous radio shops put unsuspecting victims on GMRS channels to reduce the fees charged to their customers and to maximize their profit.
Technorati Tags: GMRS,CALL24,FCC,PRA
Here is an excellent article at Campus Security Magazine on these wireless devices. The boxes serve a serious need which makes it imperative the colleges put the boxes on local government or public safety frequencies. A unit on GMRS could be interfered with by little Johnny bicycling down the street singing into his bubble-pack radio or by licensed users of the GMRS trying to communicate. Call boxes do not monitor before transmitting.
SHould you be a city, county, state, school, college, medical, or commercial facility manager the following list contains the GMRS and FRS channels these call boxes may not use:
http://www.popularwireless.com/blog1/general-mobile-radio-service-radio-frequencies/
Make it clear in your RFP’s that FCC Part 95 frequencies may not be used in call boxes.
The call boxes have apparently remained on the air regardless of FCC intervention. A PRA member reports the parking lot call box identified as “100″ at the Fredericksburg, VA campus of Germanna Community College was broadcasting on December 21, 2007. The college does not seem to be in any great hurry to remove the unlicensed GMRS transmitters used in the CALL24 call boxes.
Maybe a copy of part 95 and intent to notify should be
given to superintendant on maintenance?
n9zas.
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