General Features
• 145-174, 136-154 MHz
• 450-480, 480-512 MHz
• 400-430 MHz – avlb. mid/late 2008
• 5 W Exciter Output
• 40 / 110 / 250 W VHF Systems
• 40 / 100 / 250 W UHF Systems
• Full Duplex Repeater
• Duplex/Simplex Base Operation
• 30 CH Scanning Base (Conventional)
• Two-Digit LED Display
• 6 Programmable Function Keys
• 3 W Front Panel Speaker
• Microphone Jack
• DTMF Front Panel PF Key Control
• DTMF AUX Output Control
• DTMF AUX Input Monitoring
• FM Conventional Included
• NXDN Conventional Included
• NXDN Trunked – Option-Available
• Multi-site network is available in mid/late 2008
Note*: Some features/options are available in future releases

Mitchell sought clarification on the word “simultaneously,” asking if it referred to the signal information being retransmitted, or to the fact that the receiver and transmitter must both be active at the same time while acting on the same signal information. On March 23, 2009, the Commission clarified that even if there is a slight delay between what is received and what it transmits (as in the case of D-STAR and other digital repeaters), it is considered simultaneous if the receiver and transmitter are both active at the same time.

Mitchell pointed out in his petition that while the Commission’s Rules specify on which bands amateur repeaters may operate, “some amateur repeaters are operating on bands other than set forth in Section 97.205(b) with systems that are essentially voice repeater stations, but that digitize and retransmit the user’s voice, on the theory that because there is a small delay in retransmitting the signal of another amateur station, the signal is not ‘simultaneously’ retransmitted and, therefore, the system is not a repeater.”

In its reply, the Commission pointed out that prior to 1994, a repeater was defined as “[a]n amateur station that automatically retransmits the signals of other stations.” This, the Commission told Mitchell, was revised to clarify “that certain accommodations for message forwarding systems do not apply to other operating activities such as repeaters and auxiliary stations.” The Commission proposed to define a repeater as “[a]n amateur station that instantaneously retransmits the transmission of another amateur station on a different channel or channels,” but ultimately replaced “instantaneously” with “simultaneously” because commenters noted that there is always a small propagation delay through a repeater. As one commenter explained, “The word ‘simultaneously’ in this case means that the repeater is receiving and transmitting concurrently, whereas each signal might be slightly displaced in time between receive and transmit.”

To be able to repeat another station’s transmission, the Commission said that a repeater “must be able to receive a transmission from another station and retransmit it. Because the word ‘simultaneously’ in the definition is used to modify ‘retransmit,’ we believe it refers to a repeater station’s transmitter being active when retransmitting the signal received by the repeater station’s receiver from another amateur station. We conclude, therefore, that ‘simultaneously’ as used in the definition of a repeater refers to the receiver and transmitter both being active at the same time.”

From

San Luis Obispo county supervisors took drastic and unprecedented action
yesterday by passing an ordinance that would prohibit amateur radio
operators, known as “hams”, from operating their transmitting stations. The
measure was put in place to eliminate what officials said were health risks
associated with transmitters located close to children. A legal struggle is
expected.

By a vote of 4 to 1 with one abstention, the governing board of SLO county
took
action aimed at addressing a recent Stanford University study that
showed a correlation between ham radios and attention de ficit disorder and
hyperactivity in children, as well as nagging reports of interference caused
by radio hams operating their high-powered transmitters in residential
neighborhoods.

“Our primary responsibility is to provide a safe environment for children to
live without the dangerous effects of radio waves constantly bombarding them
and causing proven neurological and psychological problems,” said E. Duane
Nyborg, an attorney who represented the county in several court cases in the
past year. “Hams are not the only culprits, but they are usually in very
close proximity to children and are no doubt a major contributor to the
health problems we’ve been seeing. The interference is just the last straw
that convinced the county that something had to be done about it.”

Atascadero
city manager Laura Lopez said that she has seen a tenfold
increase in the number of complaints of interference from ham radio
operators in the last six months. New housing developments which have
dramatically increased the population there and placed homes unusually close
to each other are the predominant contributing factor. Similar conditions
exist in most of the county.

“We have radio hams getting into toasters, electric pianos, light bulbs,
everything, from their powerful transmitters that cause all this static.
Many of our citizens can’t use basic appliances or watch television because
of all the junk that the hams are broadcasting,” she tol d the Press-Telegram
by telephone.

Hams can’t say they didn’t see this coming. They were warned by the county
last year that if they did not submit to a check of their stations by
officials, they would have limits imposed on their operation. Few
consented
to the searches, which most decried as invasive. But nobody expected a total
ban on transmissions.

“This is outrageous. You’d better believe we’re going to fight back and win.
This is a totalitarian seizure of our rights that is totally illegal and can’t
stand up,” said Frank Wilson, a local ham club president. He said there were
no formal plans for an appeal yet but preparations were underway.

Wilson claims that a federal preemption of local zoning ordinances, called
PRB-1, delineates three rules for local municipalities to follow in
accomodating antenna structures such as are used by hams. But Nyborg says
that PRB-1 applies to antenna structures only, and not the transmitters used
to feed the antennas with a radio signal. “We know all about PRB-1. That’s
why we said nothing about antennas. This law is not about antennas. It goes
after the root of the problem, which is the transmitters
that put out huge
signals that get into the brains of our children and short-circuit them out.
Those are the facts, that’s what the scientific evidence points to,” he said
at a news conference called shortly after the county’s action.

In 2008, a grou p of researchers in the school of Environmental Health and
Safety at Stanford published their findings that exposure to ham radio
signals for three hours per day increased the risk of hyperactivity and
related disorders by 10% in children aged 12 and under. This effect was seen
when a typical ham radio was turned on up to ¼ mile away. The San Luis
Obispo city office says that up to 11,000 children in that city live that
close to a ham radio station.

The Stanford study showed that frequencies around 3.5, 7, and 14 Megahertz
were the most harmful, but that the danger existed all the way up to 450
Megahertz and above.

“We know where the hams
are, that information is easy to get on the
Internet,” said former mayor of Paso Robles and current county supervisor
Anthony Wu. “Most of these guys are running one hundred watts of power, that’s
an incredible amount of radiation, and you can’t block it out. It enters
your house, it gets into your body and does a lot of damage there.”

Cindy MacMahon, 41, of Morro Bay, soccer mom of two and volunteer at city
bake sales, praised the action by the board of supervisors and looked
forward to radio-free days ahead. “I’m always getting interference on my TV
and stereo that I’m sure is from the guy down the street with his big tower.
I don’t know why they even allow those big, ugly things. I know that my kids
are harder to control whe n he turns that thing on and I’ve been saying that
for three years.”

Most area hams were totally unaware of the new law and Wilson believes there
will be a revolt when
they discover it. “I will be speaking about it at our
club meeting on Friday. We would normally disseminate the information by
radio, but of course that’s illegal for the moment.”

Amateur radio operator Clay Collins of Pismo Beach, was incredulous. “We
provide free emergency communications for the county, we assist the police
department, we help out several times a year on all manner of public events,
and this is the thanks we get. Someone is badly informed. Next thing you
know, we’ll be accused of being responsible for global warming.” Another
radio ham who identified himself only as “Deke” said that although a number
of hams were mobilizing to do what they could he was pessimistic. “I
actually know that Nyborg guy. He walks around twelve hours a day with a
cell phone up to his head and yet he’s worried about the tiny amount of
radiation from my transmitter.” Deke claims that the frequencies of a cell

phone are close to that of a microwave oven. “You hold a [cell] phone up to
your head, you’re cooking your brain slowly,” he warned.

Collins, a ham of fifty-three years and grandfather of six, lives in a
housing tract with a homeowners’ association that already regulates ham
radio operators. He says that restrictive H OA agreements exacerbate the
problem. “By prohibiting high antenna towers, [the HOA rules] force me to
place my antennas lower and closer to my neighbors, and force me to use
higher power to make up for the difference in performance.” He said that his
antenna, which is located in his attic, creates far more radiation on the
ground than if it were up on a 50-foot tower-the same type of tower Collins
applied for in 1997 but was denied a permit for. Hams are required by the
FCC to keep track of the amount of radiation from their antennas but Collins’
station is far below the allowable
limits, he says. “In the next earthquake,
all of my neighbors will be running to my house to send messages out to
their loved ones in other places. I hope they remember this.”

Dick Henley, a member of the Electronic Industries Association who lives in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, claims that most of the interference to appliances,
televisions, and phones can’t be blamed on hams going about their normal
activity. “The vast majority of these appliances is insufficiently shielded
against external fields. The slightest interference- even from a garage door
opener or a cell phone-can disrupt it. In most cases, it’s not the ham’s
fault.” He said that on the contrary, hams are usually the ones who must
suffer with interference from these electronic devices. “Most of the stuff
coming out of China spews interference to radios, but the h ams have just
learned to live with it. Homeowners are totally oblivious to this,” he
said.

Xiang Qang, the principal investigator at Stanford who co-published the
original paper, explained that the radio waves, over the long term, polarize
cells in the brain tissue and bias a child toward rough or anti-social
behavior. “We saw these children who couldn’t sit still, couldn’t listen to
a book being read to them, and who had severe reading delays and
disabilities. We started to see that each time a television was turned on
near them, they would actually exhibit worse behavior. So we followed that
path: why the television? Why the television? Then we discovered that is
wasn’t the television, but the radiation from it. So we tested many other
types of transmitters and found that the worst ones were ham transmitters
from Icom and Yaesu, with the Kenwoods being marginally better.”

Qang explains that it is the brain’s frontal lobe which is most vulnerable
to external radiation due to its
location at the front of the cranium just
behind the forehead, its proximity to the sphenoid wing- the bone at the
temple that houses the pituitary gland- and it’s large size. “The frontal
lobe absorbs a lot of radiation and since it governs our behavior, this is
why we think that attention deficit and hyperactivity are the symptoms of
prolonged absorption of high-frequency waves in that region,” she said.

“Nonsense,” says Dr. V. Subrahaminayalakshminirayana, head of neurology at
Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. “There is absolutely no conclusive
evidence in the literature to support an ambitious and imaginative theory
that ionizing radiation can deleteriously and negatively affect behavior in
children whether the exposure is at a relatively constant low-level or
periodic.” He believes that attention deficit hyperactivity is more likely a
function of exhaustive over-stimulation of the brain by video
games,
texting, and television viewing. “Ask the Asian parents of your child’s
playmate why they never seem to have this problem,” he laughed.

In fact, the Stanford study found that Hispanic children were fourteen times
as likely to suffer the effects of radio waves than were Asian children.
Hydra Brock-Parker, dean of sociology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a
consultant named in the Stanford study, says that Hispanics live in
depressed parts of a city where houses and apartments are packed closer
together and the possibility of exposure is much greater. “Where are all of
those children going to go to escape radiation from transmitters? There’s no
backyard to play in and besides, you wouldn’t want your children playing
outside in those neighborhoods. If you’ve got, you know, a ham serial-killer
type next door flooding your apartment with high-intensity radio waves, you
have no choice but to sit
there and get sick,” she said.

Representatives20from Marin, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties were present
at the press conference and were said to be keenly interested in the
implementation of the new law. A similar measure was introduced into the
L.A. County Board’s docket on Monday and may be considered at the next
session in May.

——————————————————————————–

FCC RULES THAT DIGITAL VOICE REPEATERS ARE REPEATERS

The fcc has ruled that the claim by some owners of digital repeaters and some frequency coordinators that digital voice repeaters are not actually repeaters due to the time delay inherent in digital to analog and analog to digital conversions is erroneous.

In response to a request for a Declaratory Ruling on this issue from the Northern California Packet Association the FCC says that when a receiver and transmitter are tied together as a repeater it is a repeater. The full text of the FCC response to Gary R. Mitchell, President of the Northern California Packet Association is reprinted below.

ARNewsline will have more on this issue in our next newscast to be released on Friday, March 27th.

ARNewsline

**

Text of FCC Digital Voice Repeater Decision

Mr. Gary R. Mitchell
President, Northern California Packet Association
P.O. Box K
Sunnyvale, CA 94087

Re: Petition for Declaratory Ruling filed December 5, 2007

Dear Mr. Mitchell:

This is in response to the petition for declaratory ruling that you filed on December 5, 2007, requesting that the Commission clarify the definition of a repeater in the amateur service rules. A repeater in the amateur service is defined as “[a]n amateur station that simultaneously retransmits the transmission of another amateur station on a different channel or channels.” You seek clarification of whether the word “simultaneously” in the definition refers to the signal information being retransmitted, or to the fact that the receiver and transmitter must both be active at the same time while acting on the same signal information.

Section 97.205(b) of the Commission’s Rules specifies the bands on which amateur repeater stations may operate. You state that some amateur radio operators are operating on bands other than those set forth in Section 97.205(b) with systems that are essentially voice repeater stations, but that digitize and retransmit the user’s voice, on the theory that because there is a small delay in retransmitting the signal of another amateur station, the signal is not “simultaneously” retransmitted and, therefore, the system is not a repeater.

Prior to 1994, a repeater was defined as “[a]n amateur station that automatically retransmits the signals of other stations.” The Commission revised the definition in order to clarify that certain accommodations for message forwarding systems do not apply to other operating activities such as repeaters and auxiliary stations. The Commission proposed to define a repeater as “[a]n amateur station that instantaneously retransmits the transmission of another amateur station on a different channel or channels,” but ultimately replaced “instantaneously” with “simultaneously” because commenters noted that there is always a small propagation delay through a repeater. As one commenter explained, “The word ‘simultaneously’ in this case means that the repeater is receiving and transmitting concurrently, whereas each signal might be slightly displaced in time between receive and transmit.”

To be able to repeat another station’s transmission, a repeater must be able to receive a transmission from another station and retransmit it. Because the word “simultaneously” in the definition is used to modify “retransmit,” we believe it refers to a repeater station’s transmitter being active when retransmitting the signal received by the repeater station’s receiver from another amateur station. We conclude, therefore, that “simultaneously” as used in the definition of a repeater refers to the receiver and transmitter both being active at the same time.

Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that, pursuant to Section 4(i) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, 47 U.S.C. § 154(i), and Section 1.2 of the Commission’s Rules, 47 C.F.R. § 1.2, the Petition for Declaratory Ruling filed on December 5, 2007 by Gary R. Mitchell IS GRANTED to the extent indicated above.

This action is taken under delegated authority pursuant to Sections 0.131 and 0.331 of the Commission’s Rules, 47 C.F.R. §§ 0.131 and 0.331.

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION

Scot Stone
Deputy Chief, Mobility Division
Wireless Telecommunications Bureau

North Carolina lawmakers are again considering a ban on cell phone use
while driving, but Amateur Radio operators in the state would be
specifically exempted, thanks to an amendment requested by Bob Conder
K4RLC, the ARRL State Government Liaison officer.

The bill was debated on Tuesday by the state Senate Commerce Committee.
State Senator William Purcell, a co-sponsor of the bill, told Conder
that Amateur Radio was already exempt because it wasn’t covered by the
definition of “mobile phone”. Conder asked for a specific exemption
anyway, fearing that law enforcement officers on the street wouldn’t
make the distinction between a cell phone and ham radio. The amendment,
which reads “This term does not include two-way mobile radio
transmitters or receivers used by licensees of the Federal
Communications Commission in the Amateur Radio Service” was accepted
without discussion.

During committee debate, one Senator did ask if the bill would cover
Nextel style “push-to-talk” – operation that is similar to Amateur
Radio. After that concept was explained to some senators who didn’t
understand it, the bill’s sponsor said it “probably would” be included
in the ban.

Similar bills have been introduced in North Carolina over the past few
years, and all have been defeated or died in committee. A similar fate
is expected for this bill, but last year the state did enact a ban for
drivers under 18.

Reporting for Newsline, I’m Gary Pearce KN4AQ.  (KN4AQ)