The Personal Radio Association is no longer incorporated in the State of Maryland. Maryland requires a complicated set of tax forms to be filed each year that I do not have the money or time to complete. Maryland makes running a non-profit a complicated nightmare achievable only if there is a large membership base and a regular income. We have neither. We also have no treasurer to assume responsibility for the tax forms and more one year ago we were down to just three interested Board members and not a soul volunteering for activities we wanted to pursue. So rather than pay to file these returns to retain our Charter in Maryland I am allowing it expire.

The Personal Radio Association never pursued 501c3 status because I was unable to bear the cost after losing my job last year. My new situation was insufficient to allow any spending on the PRA. Out my own pocket I paid for an annual PO Box at which we receive no mail, a telephone number at which we receive no calls, and hours and hours of time completing and organizing reports the FCC, and hours and hours trying to build licensee awareness of shipping piuracy on GMRS inputs with virtually no response.

All we were able to accomplish was a small enforcement effort championed by a few very concerned licensees. Our connection to the FCC was severed when RIlery Hollingsworth retired. Licensees that have enforcement issues were directed then to send complaints to FCCHAM@FCC.GOV.

There is simply no reason to pursue other than an ad-hoc effort beyond this point since we cannot collect money (and we have not collected a cent.) I explained to the Board two years ago that I would not pursue this effort alone or fund it alone. I cannot afford to. My thanks to Doug and Ray for standing with me on this and stepping up to do their part. We can’t do it with three people and a lack of interest nationwide.

Around the 7,000 square mile parish he calls home, he is referred to as Father Leo. To the 185 families in Circle, Richey and Jordan, Montana, where he has served the past ten years he is a spiritual father and guide, celebrating with them weddings, baptisms and funerals. To the United States Air Force, he is Chaplain, Major, Leo McDowell,

(Father Leo rocks! Fr. Leo is the Personal Radio Assn’s honorary chaplain. A GMRS licensee from Montana, he likes gadgets and all things radio. I know Fr. Leo is going to be a big fan of the radio room on base. PRA members are encouraged to offer prayers for Fr. Leo on his mission as well as for all of the American service members deployed worldwide. God bless you Air Force Major Fr. Leo!)

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(Personal Radio Assn., Inc – Huntingtown, MD) A PRA Enforcement Team member in Virginia made the Association aware of a serious GMRS abuse. A company specializing in parking lot call boxes marketed call boxes designed for use on GMRS radio frequencies. A system in Virginia was found at a local school that used 462.575 MHz, a GMRS repeater output channel. The PRA asked FCC Special Counsel Riley Hollingsworth to investigate. PRA Board of Trustees President Doug Smith referred to this practice as a serious and “pernicious abuse” of GMRS. GMRS licensees throughout the United States are encouraged to monitor GMRS in their communities and listen for and report these devices. Hollingsworth told the PRA that the FCC has information that the GMRS parking lot call boxes are no longer sold. Despite this information a new system was heard from atop a repeater site covering the area around Culpepper Virginia the weekend of November 17, 2007. PRA monitors said it sounded like a new parking lot call box system was being tested. GMRS licensees in the area are actively looking for the unlicensed system which is already causing interfernece to licensed users of the General Mobile Radio Service. GMRS licensees can report commercial intruders on GMRS channels directly to the FCC or through the program set up up by the Personal Radio Association at http://www.praweb.org.

(Plum Point, MD) A GMRS pirate with several radio users operating as an unlicensed ineligible entity was identified by the Personal Radio Association on the evening of Friday, September 28, 2007. The pirate was operating a GMRS repeater located in the vicinity of Cambridge, MD on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. As of Saturday morning the same organization is operating the illegal radio system despite having been warned that they are operating without a license and may cause serious interference to GMRS licensees. Radio operation is occurring at a park on the Choptank River.

An organizer of the Chesapeake Man Triathlon event in Cambridge, MD was contacted on his cellular telephone. He identified the Race Director as Robert Vigarito. A law enforcement agency on the Eastern Shore provided the telephone number. The contact the PRA spoke with refused to shut down the radio system or to call the radio company that rented them the system citing safety concerns as their event was already well underway and would continue on Saturday, September 29.

GMRS licensees in the DelMarVa area including other unlicensed persons using GMRS are requested to avoid interfering with the event’s communications on 462.675 MHz. The Columbia Triathlon Association, Inc, appears to be the victim of their radio provider as is the case with most instances like this one. The United States Coast Guard is providing law enforcement support on the river and the the Cambridge Police on land near Great Marsh Park. This is a large event. The pirate repeater may only be in operation one more day.

The PRA has filed an FCC complaint form regarding unlicensed use of GMRS by an organization ineligible to license in the GMRS naming the Columbia Triathlon Association and the radio company that rented the repeater to them. The radio company information was provided by the association organizer contacted by the PRA.

A GMRS Pirate is a person, organization, or business that operates two-way radios on the General Mobile Radio Service without having first obtained the required license from the Federal Communications Commission. Organizations and businesses have not been allowed to obtain GMRS licenses since 1989. Only a few grandfathered business users remain that have since renewed licenses obtained prior to 1989. The General Mobile Radio Service is regulated by Part 95 of the FCC Rules and Regulations. Individuals are permitted to obtain GMRS licenses for their personal business and that of their family.

An all too common GMRS piracy problem has existed across the United States for years. Radio companies seeking to avoid paying license fees and performing frequency coordination filings put temporary and even full-time customers on GMRS frequencies hoping no one will ever notice. This fraudulent practice was pernicious enough to encourage GMRS licensees across the United States to form the Personal Radio Association Inc., a Maryland not-for profit corporation. The PRA actively reports GMRS rules violations and unlicensed users to the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau.

GMRS licensees authorized to use GMRS channels pay a license fee and observe radio regulations designed to facilitate channel sharing of the eight repeater frequency pairs allocated to the service. The business radio services have hundreds of channels to choose from but also have specific rules to follow under FCC Rules Part 90. It is not uncommon for a GMRS licensee to have spent thousands of dollars on their own repeater system that they in turn share with other area families. GMRS licensees are forbidden by rule to rent or to take any renumeration other than actual operating costs to/from others.

The unscrupulous radio companies rent radios on channels they are ineligible to use at the expense of those licensed to use the channels. When a local radio shop breaks the rules to put a pirate on the air the pirate is often uncooperative with GMRS licensees pretty much clueless and unaware of any rules or licensing regulations. Pirates typically operate with unacceptable radio practices causing harmful interference to licensed users of the same channels. Pirates are a persistent nuisance in the GMRS. More information on this topic can be found using our blogroll in the Bubble-Pack Pirate FAQ and GMRS Intruder Help. The PRA website is http://www.praweb.org

(Huntingtown, MD ) As a result of the FCC’s refusal to look more closely at the accuracy and validity of their ULS data the Personal Radio Assn. Inc, a Maryland not-for-profit corporation has decided to vet a sampling of the two-hundred plus names culled from the public database records of the FCC.  PRA Enforcement Team members began looking at the data on Friday August 3.

The FCC maintained that the attention address field was merely a way for citizens to have their mail sent to another convenient place like a business address. The PRA understood that well before writing their  February 2007 letter to the Bureau Chief of the FCC Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. The PRA had already found in its reports to the FCC Enforcement Bureau other licensees using the refer to address field were in fact non-individual licensees – enough to be concerned.

The very first licensee vetted by the PRA on August 3, 2007 was in fact a business owner that had obtained a license for bubble-pack radios to be used at his business.  He was a manufacturer with a large plant. A PRA member drove to the licensee’s commercial address and interviewed the licensee of record. He didn’t have to speak with our representative but did so after hearing what the PRA representative had to say.

This licensee was unaware, despite the Certification warnings on the FCC ULS,  that business users were not eligible to use  the General Mobile Radio Service.  The PRA member suggested MURS as a better alternative and the licensee agreed to use his personal GMRS license for his family activities. The PRA made a friend and validated on the first attempt that the FCC’s assertion continued to be erroneous and perhaps even a rush to judgement.

The FCC was notified of this contact and the PRA assured the FCC  that the PRA would  contact licensees across the country to verify licenses were obtained for personal use and not for non-individual licensees.  The FCC would be notified of the final results.

In most data collection work  at least ten percent of records are verified as correct and or checked for consistency, and accuracy. Anyone that collects data and then publishes it for public consumption has that obligation particularly when submitting erroneous data on purpose is a federal offense.

Reaction has been lopsided in favor of the PRA. Only one GMRS licensee, a member of a large repeater group in Southern California, suggested the PRA was “wasting the FCC’s time” and that he hoped the PRA was “proud of” themselves.  Members tended to agree that the PRA had an obligation under its charter to make sure the FCC watched over the ULS process to prevent fraud.

The PRA stand is that yes it took what seemed to be a fairly innocuous and obvious potential problem to the federal agency responsible for collecting the data and suggested they vet the data and then cancel licenses issued in error.  A blanket DENIED was not expected.

The ULS is an automated on-line application process. Persons using the ULS have an enormous amount of legalese to read through. To the non-technical and uninitiated it can be a daunting process from screen to screen. A licensee must first create an FRN and then complete an application while trying to understand the complicated definitions behind all of the questions. The applicant then must complete Form 159 before the license fee can be paid.

The PRA believes there are indeed organizations and/or businesses that applied for and received licenses simply because they didn’t know any better. There may also be those that thought they could pull one over on the FCC and disguise their operations as legitimate to avoid the high cost of commercial licensing. The latter has been a SIGNIFICANT problem to GMRS licensees created by dishonest and unscrupulous radio shops that have placed businesses on GMRS channels and repeater inputs across the country for years without using a license to hide the fraud!  ULS allows potential errors to go both ways in the opinion of the PRA and the FCC needs to deal with it.

You might be one of the small number of licensees contacted by the PRA in this survey of sorts. Help the PRA improve the process for GMRS licensing.

(Huntingtown, MD – 041907) Do you live in a port city where GMRS lciensees suffer from interference from international vessels operating in violation of our law and IARU regulations? The Personal Radio Association Inc. and PopularWireless Magazine have called this problem to the attention of Federal Commnications Commission. FCC Enforcement Bureau Special Counsel Riley Hollingsworth, with the approval of Enforcement Bureau Chief Kris Monteith, is assisting us by asking for the help of the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard boards most international vessels that enter U.S.waters. The Commandant of the Coast Guard was asked in an internal inter-agency memo from the FCC to assit in notifying foreign vessels of the the NTIA regulations associated with using ship-board radio in US waters. This memo was sent in October 2006.

The PRA needs your help in determining the effect this memo has had on compliance. We need licensees to log interference they hear on GMRS inputs or other frequencies. The most frequently used are 467.550 and 467.575 MHz though ships have been heard on every GMRS channel. NTIA regulations require ships to use two assigned frequencies while in US waters that are NOT in the GMRS allocation.

You can log any interference in the PRA message forum set aside for logging at the PopularWireless Personal Radio BBS.

(Huntingtown, MD 4/19/07) PRA members now have an on-line place to meet exclusively with the PRA Inc., Board of Trustees. PopularWireless.com has created a PRA Members Only message area on the new Personal Wireless BBS. PRA Board of Trustee Member and Membership Chairman Doug Didigio is setting up members to access the new message area. PRA members that have filed applications with the association should contact Doug at ddigio@praweb.org and give him your PopularWireless log on.

The PRA is still looking for volunteers to fill various posts so please do sign up!

The Personal radio Association Inc., is looking for someone who can LEAD the PRA Enforcement program. Leadership ability is a prerequisite. The applicant must write well, negotiate well, and have the patience required to deal with the FCC and the Board of Trustees of the PRA. Management or law enforcement supervision experience is desired but all applicable experience will be considered.The PRA Enforcement Leader will:

1. Maintain the enforcement program, including GMRS, FRS, MURS, CB complaints and our on-line auction monitoring program.
2. Develop reporting structures for licensees in every state. Assign state chairpersons. Develop a volunteer monitoring teams as required.
3. Monitor and maintain the Enforcement Team message area of the PopularWireless.com bulleting board.
4. Report periodically to the PRA Board of Trustees.

The applicant is:

1. Up to date on FCC GMRS, FRS, CB rules.
2. Willing to put the time in to make it work as a volunteer.
3. Potentially travel once each year on your own dime to PRA annual meetings and give a presentation in front of the membership.
4. Meet regularly with the Board of Trustees and your own teams.

Application is by resume to the PRA Board of Trustees, P.O. Box 485, Huntingtown, MD. Please, in a cover letter tell us what you would like to do and how you would like to do it. Let me know your resume is coming by email or a post in this forum.

Applicants must never have been the subject of an FCC enforcement action including but not necessarily limited to an NOUO, NOV, warning letter from Riley Hollingsworth etc.