H.R. 607 "Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011" threatens part of 70cm band

Chicken Little lives on the 'zed!

 

440-450

if they want the band badly they will get it.. very little arrl can do about it.... they dont have enough stroke if the homeland security wants it.... sides.. 440 isnt used here much anyway

 

I don't get your train of thought. One one hand you say you would rather lose 900 mhz or 1.2 ghz instead of 430 but then you say they took half of the 220 band and didn't consider hams using the spectrum. Don't you think that maybe other hams are using 900 Mhz or 1.2 ghz? Live up to the basic amateur radio code, consider others. You post "god bless" and the end of your post. If you are truly religious you would consider others, not just yourself. UPS didn't use 220-221 because cell phones started to appear and they found out it would be much much less expensive to use cellphones instead of investing in their own multi-million dollar communications system.

 

it seems like to me no one who wrote this bill or is co sponsoring it knows anything about radio spectrum use at all I have to ask with as much spectrum is now available in the 700-800MGHz bands for all this public safety re-banding that this all can be redone with out reselling much if any of the UHF spectrum as it is already being sold for use commercially and when all the public safety folks get off of the 450-470 area they would have more than enough spectrum available there. ALSO pushing now for everyone to go to the 6.25 rather than the 12.5 spacing across the board. along with a few other things. I personally would like us in the Amateur community to lead the way on this by going to the 6.25 spacing in the VHF and UHF repeater spectrum and mandating PL tones on and off the repeaters.
just my 2 cents here...............

 

Wonder if they bothered to ask the local agencies if they WANT interop.

Locally, several of the smaller agencies have long had the ability to jump over and talk on the adjacent city or county systems. They almost never use it even when there is an incident going on where multiple cities are involved. Why not? Agency A doesn't want Agency B's users talking directly on their system. They jealously guard their territory. They have their own protocols and signals and codes and their own way of doing things.

Meanwhile users on Agency B's system don't want "to be the guy" who dares to jump over there and cause a big stink, not to mention when he's over there, he can't talk to his own people any more, which makes HIS superiors angry. Hey unit whatever, where the heck were you? Over on Podunk Township's system? WHAT? Do you get paid to talk to them?

The result of all is that units invariably ask their dispatch to pass messages via telephone rather than use the interop capabilities. Nothing is going to change that.

What this WILL change is squashing the commercial market for 450-460 radio gear much of which can be used for 440 ham uses. Kiss goodbye most or all your Quansheng or Wouxun UHF radios and probably dual-banders from the likes of Yaesu or Icom or Kenwood. Nobody is going to have any incentive to make conventional radios for 440.

What I want to know is where all the commercial users in 450-470 are supposed to go? There are millions of those radios in use, by hundreds of thousands of licensees.

 

Yeah, why don't they? I am with many organizations and most of them will have a format letter that you fill in your name, address, e-mail address and it will send it for you. Thank you Dave!