(New Jersey/New York) – PRA members  in New York and New Jersey heard a steady carrier on 462.700 MHz for about two days, January 10-12,2008. The signal showed no signs of going away so members put their RDF capability to work. In a stunningly short time,  just thirty minutes,  the repeater site was located. The member locating the repeater determined that there was no signal on the repeater input causing the repeater to hang. The probable cause was believed to be a defective repeater controller.

The owner of the repeater could not be immediately determined by making calls on the repeater itself. Not a soul was listening on any active tone. There were an astounding number of CTCSS tones active on the system which begs the question are these tones all necessary?

The repeater antenna was located on a tower belonging to a television broadcast station. Contact was made at the station and the situation explained. Station staff were very helpful providing the telephone number of the manager for the station technical staff. Station staff did not know at the time who the repeater belonged to but assured the PRA member it would be turned off by Saturday morning.

The repeater did turn off finally and is no longer causing interference. The PRA Enforcement Teams would like to remind all repeater owners that you have an OBLIGATION to monitor your GMRS system to PREVENT such occurrences. Situations like this should not take days to resolve by other licensees.  The repeater itself had no control operator on duty to monitor it’s functions  and control operator is REQUIRED.

When no one is using a GMRS repeater system it should be turned off by a control operator to prevent unauthorized operation or malfunctions when no operator is on duty. This is particularly true in areas like New Jersey and New York where there are numerous GMRS repeater systems sharing the same frequency. It is the polite and courteous thing to do.

Yet, for many living in the inland empire’s capital city, the free service isn’t a bonus, it’s a burden. The new network adds even more sources of interference to the already crowded wireless spectrum. (PopWireless: Wired Magazine’s article on wi-fi over crowding and interference. Amateur Radio is affected by this as well since wi-fi channels 1 through 4 are allocated to the Amateur Service a fact I think the article missed. DIGG this. It’s an important topic.)

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(Huntingtown, MD) It is possible to identify an in-transit ship as the most likely source of FSI (Foreign Shipping Interference) in the GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service.) Using an AIS – Automatic Identification System receiver and a directional antenna the signal from ship’s AIS transponder will tell you the ship’s name, it’s ITU MMSI registration, call sign, country of registration and destination. Using the MMSI look up at the ITU you can determine what company owns the ship.

On the Chesapeake Bay near Plum Point, MD the PopularWireless AIS receiver has so far identified three ships using GMRS channels while in US waters. Vessels from Norway, Vanuatu, and Singapore are currently on the Foreign Shipping Interference Log. The Norwegian vessel was docked and easily identified with a directional Yagi antenna at some twelve miles distant. The ships from Vanuatu and Singapore passed PopularWireless on the Chesapeake Bay and each was followed with the directional antenna as they sailed by.

The requirements are pretty simple but there is an investment in equipment. The first AIS receiver was an ICOM IC-R8500 receiver. A wide variety of inexpensive scanner receivers can be used as long as the one selected can be modified to take audio directly from the radio discriminator. The receiver was changed that to an SR-161 AIS receiver purchased for $189 from Milltech Marine. The power requirements are very low. An older three-amp power supply was used successfully. The antenna is a VHF antenna with LMR400 cable at about 60 feet above sea level and of course the higher the better. Use good low-loss feed line. The SR-161 serial data from is connected to a computer with Ship Plotter software installed. The switch to serial data from an audio feed to the sound card restored another analog audio input on the computer used for recording ship transmissions on the unauthorized channels also via the ICOM R-8500. The ShipPlotter software is about $30. The payment is processed in Europe so the price is up and down a bit based on the current exchange rate.

Using the ShipPlotter software you can super impose the ship on marine navigation charts or photographs from Google Earth. It is possible to zoom in on a chart to determine where a ship is berthed or moored. A bearing from the chart to your location can be compared to the bearing determined from the directional antenna. ShipPlotter has an active Yahoo Group where the program author and active users provide some support for users of the software. It is even possible for a group of licensees to create their own server and share local data using this product.

Now if you don’t have the cash to purchase an AIS receiver you can purchase the AIS software at Shipplotter.com and watch the feeds from various ports around the United States. There are many ShipPlotter users sending regular data on many US ports that a GMRS licensee could use to help identify Foreign Shipping Interference from a ship illegally using GMRS channels in US waters. Ports in Delaware, Virginia, Texas, California, Washington, and even the Great Lakes are covered. Licensees will also find that many other websites that display AIS ship data on line. Another good one is ShipPlotting.com.

Once the name and owner of the ship is known the GMRS licensee can attempt to contact the ship owner directly by email or mail. My first attempt to contact a ship owner in Singapore was unsuccessful. This did not surprise me given the lack of cooperation from ship’s Captains I have encountered on both coasts. Should the licensee be unsuccessful, a Personal Radio Association GMRS Interference form can be completed (available at PRAWEB.ORG) and sent to the FCC GMRS address in Gettysburg (See Part 95) directly or through the PRA along with the AIS data and the directional methods used to verify the source of the radio signals was the ship in question.

Licensees curious what ships are in or around the area of Southern Maryland can check the AIS Map of the Chesapeake Bay generated at PopularWireless HQ through the courtesy of Shipplotter AIS software and unique scripts written by Shipplotting.com.

At PopularWireless two ICOM-R8500′s and one RadioShack PRO-2006 monitor GMRS, FRS, and international shipping frequencies to assist in the identification of FSI. On any complaint audio files can be recorded and sent to the offending company as evidence. All three scanners are controlled by Spectrum Manager, a ScanStar product. Spectrum Manager is an outstanding product and is very useful for this purpose. A PC audio card conversion to the M-Audio Delta 1010LT purchased from SweetWater will allow recording up to eight computer controlled radio receivers.

(Huntingtown, MD 080307) – GMRS is not Ham radio. It is also not the private playground of hobby buff groups, long-winded super heroes with a delusional sense of self importance, or national public service organizations that consider family communication ((FCC 95.1(a) The General Mobile Radio Service.)) unimportant on their own radio-activity scale. But today I wondered.

Tropospheric ducting ((See William Hepburn’s Tropospheric Forecasts)) is in big time this morning. I can hear the illegal periodic Morse ID’s (( Repeater ID not required see FCC R&R 95.119(e) )) from free-running automatic GMRS repeaters ((Automatic operation prohibited. FCC R&R 95.103(a) )) ((FCC R&R 95.171 Station Operator Duties. Control operator required)) and then comes the DX’er from Virginia. In a blaze of glory and with great enunciation and fanfare he announces his call sign, his national public service affiliation complete with unit number (in the single digits wow!) as though it gives him some special right to access a repeater for which he happens to have the squelch access tone — a repeater hundreds of miles or more distant. ((GMRS repeaters are private property see FCC R&R 95.103(b) )) He’s DX’ing! (Amateur radio lingo for talking by radio to distant stations.) Woo hoo! Look at me I can talk long distances on a radio intended for short distance family communication! Wowee zowee!

It’s one thing to be using your GMRS radio and find that during tropo you are accessing the wrong or multiple repeaters. It’s another to go fishing for QSO’s. ((FCC 95.33 Cooperative use of radio stations in the GMRS.)) The multiple repeater problem occasionally happens to me and my wife as we use a local 575 repeater. When we find ourselves bringing up more than one repeater we leave the air very quickly so as not to compound the obvious interference problem.

Today, the entire East Coast of the United States of America had to listen to what amounted a Ham radio QSO on 462.550 MHz between two hams that happen to also use GMRS. ((FCC R&R 95.181 Permissible Communications)) ((FCC R&R 95.7 Channel Sharing))

I believe that hams should take advantage of UHF tropo on 440, 220 or 2 meters. Hams have MORE THAN ENOUGH SPECTRUM to enjoy their hobby. That said how about knocking off the repeater DX’ing done solely for self aggrandizement and curiosity. It makes you look foolish and silly and it accomplishes nothing, nada, zip. You make it harder for the rest of us and our families to use our family communication systems.

When tropospheric ducting is active, GMRS licensees should make a conscious decision to reduce their talk time with their local users. ((FCC R&R 95.7(a) Channel Sharing)) Keep transmissions to the point, communicate and leave the air. Use common sense. Be polite. Remember that our rules require all of us to share a VERY TINY resource among thousands of families, and hundreds of UNCOORDINATED repeaters and simplex operations. If you can be heard across thousands of square miles while you discuss the health of a mutual acquaintance maybe you shouldn’t be talking! ((FCC R&R Part 95.7(b) ))

I’d like to know what others think of this. Should we add an item to the PRA GMRS Operator’s Code of Ethics that spells it out? What should our reaction be?

It is hard to take the national public service groups seriously while their members and leadership are DX’ing on GMRS. Those groups should consider a POLICY STATEMENT forbidding repeater DX-ing and insisting their members follow the GMRS rules. It’s the courteous thing to do.

Flash! A repeater owner in New York state sent the blog a recording of this same person’s access to the New York repeater. Hard to believe.