|
Michigan Area Repeater Council |
|
|
|
Home
| Bylaws | Standards | Band Plan | Procedures | Resolutions |
|
|
|
R. Bruce Winchell – N8UT |
|
|
|
Exactly what is Coordination? Simply put, coordination is a process used
as part of Spectrum Management. Spectrum management is the real,
behind-the-scenes job of all coordination organizations. Spectrum management
is the act of attempting to achieve the most efficient and effective use of
available frequencies allocated for a specific usage. The monetary value of
Amateur Radio Service frequency allocations is in the billions of dollars.
The importance of maximizing effective usage of our allowed spectrum is
becoming more important every year. Powerful commercial interests seek to
take more and more of our allocations all the time, and if we do not use our
spectrum effectively and efficiently, we will lose it. A coordination statement is a very basic
form of a legal contract agreement. Few people realize this fact, just like
they do not realize that accepting a cash register receipt signifies the
conclusion of a sales contract agreement. The very form you use to make
application for a coordination has a contractual agreement at the bottom that
states: “Agreement: I certify that I have read and agree to abide by MARC
Bylaws, Standards and Procedures; and that the statements above are true,
complete and correct to the best of my knowledge.” When a coordination is
issued by a coordinating organization, it is offering you a contract. When
you accept an offered coordination, you are voluntarily entering into a
contract. A contract contains information, or terms, to which the parties
involved have agreed to be bound. The MARC, as a coordinating organization
recognized by the FCC, offers you the protections of coordination for your
repeater in exchange for your promise to keep the repeater on the air and
operating properly from its coordinated location and as it is described in
the Coordination Statement, your promise to monitor users of your repeater to
assure good operating procedures are used, and your promise to report the
current condition and configuration of your repeater, in writing, every two
years. A point of some confusion and lots of
mis-information, is present in the fact that a coordination between the MARC
and a Sponsor (the actual holder of the coordination) is not legally
considered “Real Property.” As a result, a contract of the type represented
by a MARC coordination, cannot be owned. In the eyes of the Law, anything
that is not physical property or intellectual property cannot be bought or
sold. A coordination is simply a contractual agreement between two parties
and it cannot be bought, transferred directly to a third party, given away,
or sold. The MARC ruling documents clearly state that “The Sponsor is the
actual holder of the coordination.” You can HOLD a coordination, but you
cannot OWN one. There is a very important and distinct legal difference
between “holding” and “owning”. VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Beware when buying repeater equipment.
Coordination agreements are in NO WAY connected or attached to repeater
equipment of any kind. Many, many people have been lied to regarding this
fact. Anyone who attempts to tell you that his or her old coordination is
included in the sale of any equipment is lying to you! Anyone who attempts to
sell you a coordination is committing fraud! They don’t OWN it, and therefore
they cannot sell it or give it away. A coordination is married ONLY to a
specific LOCATION, NOT to equipment or individuals. What are the advantages of being
coordinated? Let me begin by stating that it is not
illegal to own and operate an uncoordinated repeater according to Part 97 of
the FCC rules. It is, however, very unwise and quite risky from a liability
standpoint, to operate an uncoordinated repeater. Coordination offers you
some very important and valuable protections. First, interference complaints
between an uncoordinated machine and a properly coordinated machine are
always decided in favor of the coordinated machine. This is standard FCC
policy. Second, the very nature of the coordination process that must be
followed by the Coordinator, assures the best possible protection you can get
against “interference” from other coordinated, co-channel repeaters. The
Coordinator must follow specific rules that protect your covered territory. The correct way to become coordinated. First, don’t put up a repeater and then
expect it to be coordinated. The fact that a repeater is operational gives
you absolutely zero leverage in getting a coordination. You are more likely
to find yourself dealing with a slightly angered Coordinator if you pre-empt
the coordination process. Second, don’t even bother to put in for a
Local Class repeater. The MARC has not coordinated Local Class repeaters
since 1991, when the members decided that Local Class repeaters were not in
keeping with the basic principles of maximizing usage of available spectrum. You have to go beyond just a basic idea of
what you are trying to accomplish. You must have a definite, written plan. ·
How much range do expect to cover with your proposed repeater? ·
What kinds of equipment are you going to use to achieve this goal? ·
How many watts to the antenna will it take? ·
What kind of feed line are you going to use? ·
What kind of feed line would be the best? ·
What kind of antenna are you going to use? ·
How high off the ground is the antenna going to be? · Do
you need to run a PL tone? ·
What PL tone should you use? ·
Where is the repeater going to be located? ·
What are the exact map coordinates of that location? ·
What is the height above sea level for that location? NOTE: If you do not have a location
absolutely locked in, don’t apply for coordination until you do. These are all things you must know before
you can expect a coordination attempt to be made on your behalf. Sound pretty daunting to you? Here is one big secret that no one ever
takes advantage of: OK, let’s assume you have the above
information together. The next thing you should do, is go to the
MARC website and file a request for a new coordination. Fill in every item on
the form. If you cannot fill out every item on the form, your plan is not
complete. Feel free to put whatever statements you feel are important in the
“comments” area. Be sure to put cross streets to your proposed location in
the comments area. You can do this in less than ten minutes. You may also
print out the form from the website and file by regular USPS mail, but it is
not recommended. The use of email and computers now totally dominates the
workflow of MARC and the Coordinator. The submission of a paper form is
outside of the normal workflow, and slows the entire process down. When you
file electronically, a permanent record of your request is automatically
created. Paper forms can, and do, get lost. IMPORTANT: Do NOT send multiple
requests. This really confuses
things and slows the process to a crawl. When multiples are sent, a search
must be conducted to determine which one is the oldest. This is very time
consuming. If you are making a legitimate change in your proposal, send a
simple email to the Coordinator with that information. The most important items on the
application for coordination are the map coordinates. Be sure to give them in
Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds if you can. Give the street address and the
nearest cross street(s) to your proposed location. This allows the
Coordinator to verify the map coordinates and correct them if necessary, by
means of computer mapping programs. If you wish to use a computer map program
to determine your correct location, we recommend either Precision Mapping or
TopoUSA. The entire coordination process is based on a location. The location
must be accurate. What does NOT make a difference in
gaining coordinated status. ARES/RACES and Skywarn hold absolutely no
importance in the coordination process. Expressing such needs in your
application will gain you no favor. Nearly every request we receive states
such a dire need. We don’t care what you intend to properly use a repeater
for. We are only concerned with whether or not we can coordinate the
configuration you describe, at the location you specify. We know that this
stand grates on some people and organizations, but please understand that the
entire coordination process is part of Spectrum Management. Spectrum Management
has no concern with what kind of traffic repeaters carry, or what kind of
organization uses them. Spectrum management and the coordination process is
concerned only with Location and Station Configuration. Our job is to get
clear, efficient, maximum coverage and usage out of available spectrum by
squeezing in as many quality repeaters as possible. Finding a frequency pair. The easiest way to find an open pair is to
put what band you want in the appropriate spot on the application and let the
Coordinator find one for you. Buying repeater equipment that is set up for a
specific pair, moving it, and expecting to be coordinated for that pair, is
nearly always a fatal error. It is also rare that an applicant actually finds
a pair on his own that will work. One of the reasons for this is that the
exact coordinates for existing repeaters are known only to the MARC and the
repeater Trustees. A pin, a measured piece of string, and a ruler on a State
Highway map cannot begin to match the accuracy of a computer loaded with all
the proper coordinates from the MARC database. Another factor is that not all
coordinated repeaters are listed either in the ARRL Repeater Directory, or
the MARC website. This is at the request of some of the repeater
trustees/owners. Yes, there are private repeaters and it is a legal usage.
Repeaters that have a delinquent reporting status at the time our data is
sent to the ARRL for inclusion in their Repeater Directory are not listed in
that publication. There are some uncoordinated machines that we know of that
are also not published anywhere. NOTE: There is a common misconception that
because a repeater is shown in Red on the website, that it is automatically
going to be de-coordinated and that the pair is going to be immediately available
for re-coordination to someone else. This is not true. It is merely a
statement of when we last received a report for that machine. It’s a
reminder. It’s an attempt at public embarrassment, to get the Trustee to act.
It usually works, eventually. IF the MARC Coordinator and the MARC Board
decide to formally de-coordinate a repeater that is actually not on the air,
the total process takes at least 7 months before the pair becomes available.
If the Coordinator and Board decide to use the Automatic Withdrawal of a
coordination for report delinquency, as allowed in the Standards, there is
also a grace period involved. We prefer to use de-coordination only as a last
resort. A de-coordination process can be stopped at any time by the offender
bringing the situation into compliance. What happens during the coordination
process? Here are the steps the Coordinator must
take in a coordination process.
How long will it take? As you can see, there are a lot of steps
that must be followed. The time it takes to reach a “yes” or “no” decision
regarding possible coordination is dependent on a lot of variables. Depending
on how much time the volunteer Coordinator has, and how long it takes to get
answers back from the adjacent states, (the two largest variables) it usually
takes less than a month. However, if you are in the SE or SW quadrants of the
Lower Peninsula, it can take considerably longer. This is because there are
often a number of frequencies that are open inside Michigan, and it takes time
to process the entire list with the adjacent states. The adjacent state
coordinators like to see a single frequency on an NOPC. They will sometimes
consider two possibilities, but refuse to consider long lists of
possibilities all at once. What are the odds of gaining
coordinated status? The answer to this depends on where you
want to put the repeater and what band you are interested in. Take a State highway map and draw a line
between Frankfort, above Manistee on the West coast, and Harrisville on the East
coast. Above this line there are a few remaining possibilities for
coordination on all the bands. This is closing up very quickly. There have
been a great many repeaters coordinated recently in that area. This is an
area where a 220 or 6m machine is almost a shoo-in, because the Upper
Penninsula has no repeaters on either of those two bands, and Wisconsin
separation mileage increases with the narrowing of the Lower Peninsula land
mass. Now draw another line following M46 from
Sandusky on the East to Whitehall on the West. The area between the northern
line and M46 has virtually no possibility of coordination on two meters or
440. There are still some openings possible on 220 and 6m. The closer you get
to the West coast, the more the odds increase against you, regardless of
band. As of June, 2003, two meters is closed
below M46. There is nothing available anywhere. The 440 band is very close to
being closed in that same area. In the SE quadrant, there is virtually
nothing available on 220 440, or six meters. I expect that the SE quadrant
will very soon be closed to any further new coordinations below 900mhz. The
SW quadrant is also nearing saturation. The SW quadrant is nearly impossible
to coordinate on any band, because of the absolutely huge numbers of
repeaters on all bands within 100 miles in Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.
It takes an enormous amount of time and the patience of a Saint to work a
coordination request in this quadrant, and 99% of all coordination attempts
fail. What is the future of Michigan
coordination? I have watched the bands rapidly become
saturated for over 4 years. I see people realizing that the 2m, and 440 bands
are almost no longer available for new coordinations anywhere. I see a strong
interest in 220 and 6m and it will not take long for those bands to reach
saturation as well. In some places, they are saturated already. This leaves
us with 900mhz and up. There are very strong indicators that this is where
the action is going to be in the near future. The MARC is currently
developing band plans for those UUHF bands and there are coordination
requests for several 900mhz and 2.4ghz repeaters awaiting action right now.
The ultra-ultra high frequencies are where the bulk of future new
coordinations will be made. The
lower bands will basically become maintenance areas for the MARC, even if
application of new technologies allows shorter co-channel separations. At
shorter co-channel separations, the problem of clearing the adjacent states
is still going to exist. The adjacent states are all using shorter co-channel
separations now, they generously apply their shorter distances to our NOPCs,
and we still cannot get anything past them 95% of the time. If we ever
shorten our distances inside Michigan, it won’t make a difference in the SE
and SW quadrants or up our West coast, and that is where most requests for
new coordinations originate. |
|
|
|
|