On Wed, 7 May 2008 00:06:21 EDT, AF6AY wrote:

HF on the EM spectrum has far fewer users (other than hams
now than it did four decades ago. The US military uses it now
for backup (with limited traffic handling) as a sort of last-resort
contingency use.

Very much out of the spotlight, states and counties have been setting
up HF networks on "commercial" frequencies for disaster relief, search
and rescue, and other functions where VHF/UHF won't do. I'm involved
with that here. This is in parallel with, not supplanting, the
volunteer services that amateur operators are rendering on HF, VHF,
and UHF through the ARES/RACES organizations. Not surprisingly, most
of the career professional Emergency Communication managers of these
governmental units are hams as well.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

On Wed, 7 May 2008 00:07:53 EDT, AF6AY wrote:

None of us 24/7 grunt communicators required any
federal license to do our jobs.

You've been saying that for years, Len. It's disingenuous at best.

It's accurate to say that none of you had to have an _FCC_ license to
do your job. In reality, the "Federal license" that was required was
the assignment to your job by military superiors - who could yank you
out of there for any reason, real or imagined, effectively 'canceling"
that "license". At least the FCC has to hold a hearing at which you
can defend yourself.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

On May 7, 9:02�pm, Phil Kane wrote:
On Wed, 7 May 2008 00:06:21 EDT, AF6AY wrote:
The migration of mass-volume messaging from HF to
microwaves via commsat and, later, high-speed optical fiber cable,
were done to avoid the ionospheric disturbances common to HF.

Actually, Len, the first "migration" was to the pre-fiber undersea
cables.

The first of which (TAT-1) became operational in 1956.

Both the coaxial (copper) and fiber cables under the oceans require
repeaters if their length exceeds 100 km or so. Some of the early
undersea coaxial cables with their vacuum-tube repeaters are still
functional, but their capacity is trivial compared to the fibers.

�I was involved in moving Israel's circuits off HF onto the
Haifa-Marseilles cable (and thence onto the TAT-5 cable) in 1967,
several years before the parallel Intelsat satellite service was
turned on. �We had several ISB circuits to NY - double hop, mind
you -
and the rest of our circuits were HF to London, Paris, Athens,
Moscow,
and several other European cities and thence by landline and
TAT-5 to the rest of the world.

Great story, Phil! Does any of that remain as a backup? My guess would
be that it is long gone.

From a capacity standpoint, satellites are the backup now in most
places, because the fiber bandwidth is so much greater.

It wasn't just ionospheric disturbance that pushed the change to
satellites and cable, either. There's only so much useful HF spectrum,
and the newer technologies offer many orders of magnitude greater
bandwidth.

�Of course, that all changed when Intelsat and
the fiber cables came into service.

And it continues to change. In this area, direct fiber-to-the-customer
is becoming the standard; many homes here have no copper
communications and little if any radio reception at all. Everything
comes through the fiber - telephone (multiple lines if you want),
highspeed internet, and TV. The fiber is RFI-and EMI-immune, too. The
biggest headache they present for us hams is that sometimes the
switching power supply for the customer equipment is electrically
noisy.

IMHO the real threat to Amateur Radio isn't the possible reallocation
of the HF amateur bands to other services (although that's always a
possibility, and VHF/UHF are not nearly so secure).

The major threat today, I think, is that the bands we have - MF, HF,
VHF and UHF - are slowly being made less-usable or even unusable by a
combination of factors:

1) Lack of enforcement against intruders, such as unlicensed use of 10
meters by truckers and others, spreading out from 11 meters. This has
been a problem since at least the 1970s.

2) Reduction in the number of housing units where a ham can have a
reasonable antenna system. Boilerplate anti-antenna CC&Rs have been
pretty standard since the 1970s in many areas, and once in place they
are often impossible to remove.

3) Consumer electronics that are not adequately RFI proofed.

4) Consumer electronics and other devices that make excessive RF noise
in the ham bands. As the number of such devices increases, the noise
floor in many locations rises to unusable levels.

5) A regulatory environment where the above problems are simply not
given any priority. (You know more about that than I, Phil!)

73 de Jim, N2EY

(who had a small part in the installation of some overland fibers back
in the '80s and '90s)

On Wed, 7 May 2008 00:10:29 EDT, AF6AY wrote:

The AN/PRC-25 was solid-state except for the single vacuum tube
in the PA. AN/PRC-77 was its fully solid-state version. Both
were VHF with channelized tuning (considered abhorent by a few
hams) but turned out to be mainstays for Vietnam field radio use.
Both are now obsolete.

And we will never see them on the commercial surplus market available
to hams, like the WW-II stuff was decades earlier.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

On Wed, 7 May 2008 22:30:41 EDT, wrote:

And it continues to change. In this area, direct fiber-to-the-customer
is becoming the standard; many homes here have no copper
communications and little if any radio reception at all. Everything
comes through the fiber - telephone (multiple lines if you want),
highspeed internet, and TV. The fiber is RFI-and EMI-immune, too. The
biggest headache they present for us hams is that sometimes the
switching power supply for the customer equipment is electrically
noisy.

The biggest headache for the subscriber is that all of the eggs are in
one basket and all it takes is some bozo with a backhoe to sever the
cable (trunk or drop) and everything goes away.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

On Wed, 7 May 2008 13:48:04 EDT, "Ivor Jones"
wrote:

It's the principle of the thing that annoys me, though. Even where we are
primary users, such as 2m, we can claim *no* protection from interference,
even if the cause of said interference shouldn't be there.

Things must have changed since my initial training in international
radio regulation in the mid-1960s where the British Post Office (the
forerunner of the RA) was held up as a model of "we'll lock you up if
you don't have a licence to operate there" - and the French were
pointed out as an example of "the ordinary citizen needs a radio as
much as he needs a machine gun".....hams were a grudging exception,
and of course when cellphones became available, everyone got one
because they knew that cellphones were not radios, right? g

Then again, the FCC in the US - where I ultimately spent most of my
professional career - was also very involved in "catching bad guys".
The epidemic of unlawful CB operations of the 1970s and 80s - for
which most of the world's governments never forgave the US - and an
unfortunate shift in regard to what the government's obligations were
- changed all that.

Notwithstanding the historical precedents of military-civilian sharing
of frequency bands, granting commercial interests licenses to operate
in the amateur bands is basic bad regulatory policy. All of us
old-time regulation professionals knew that as an article of faith.
The new crop is guided more by the buck (or the Euro, or the quid)
than by what good regulatory policy is.

As far as the military goes, I learned early in the game that de
facto the military of any country can operate on any frequency that it
so desires if (1) it doesn't interfere with anything operating in that
country and it (2) doesn't identify. If it wants to play the
gentleman game the country will notify the operation to the ITU
Radiocommunications Bureau (ITU-R) which now does what the
International Frequency Registration Bureau (IFRB) did before ITU
reorganization. Whether the information is accurate or not is an
exercise left for the listener.
--

73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net

Ah, thanks. However, over here we do have "legal" intrusions into some of
the amateur bands, most are in the microwave region, notably 10GHz, where
we lost a sizeable chunk a while back.

The main one though is 431-432 MHz which is not available for use within
100km of Charing Cross (central London) and also for some distance around
the military radar installation at Fylingdales in Yorkshire. In the London
area I believe it's allocated to taxis of all things..! There isn't a lot
of amateur activity in that segment, I think some wide-split repeaters may
have inputs or outputs there but generally it's a low-occupancy segment of
the band, so all in all it's not a major hassle.

It's the principle of the thing that annoys me, though. Even where we are
primary users, such as 2m, we can claim *no* protection from interference,
even if the cause of said interference shouldn't be there.

73 Ivor G6URP

The main problem in the UK is not the commercial use of 431-432 in the
London area, rather the proliferation of licence exempt low power devices.
Everything from key fobs to weather stations and tower crane anti-collision
systems. They are popping up quite legally all over 70cms.

Even one 70cms repeater was ordered off the air because it was stopping
people from remotely opening their car doors in a nearby carpark!

The UK has a Pave Paws derivative at Fylingdales at that caused a ban on new
repeater applications in 70cms, the military being worried about the
increase in noise floor that additional signals would introduce.

73
Jeff

In news Phil Kane typed, for some strange,
unexplained reason:
: On Wed, 7 May 2008 13:48:04 EDT, "Ivor Jones"
: wrote:
:
: It's the principle of the thing that annoys me, though. Even where
: we are primary users, such as 2m, we can claim *no* protection from
: interference, even if the cause of said interference shouldn't be
: there.
:
: Things must have changed since my initial training in international
: radio regulation in the mid-1960s where the British Post Office (the
: forerunner of the RA) was held up as a model of "we'll lock you up if
: you don't have a licence to operate there" - and the French were
: pointed out as an example of "the ordinary citizen needs a radio as
: much as he needs a machine gun".....hams were a grudging exception,
: and of course when cellphones became available, everyone got one
: because they knew that cellphones were not radios, right? g

Indeed. My friend Colin G3USA (great callsign, eh..!) tells me that in his
early days on air in the 60's an amateur could expect to be regularly
visited by an officer of the Radio Investigation Service who would check
your logbook and that you knew how to use a wavemeter for example.

In my 25 years of being licensed I've never been inspected once.

73 Ivor G6URP

Phil Kane wrote:
On Wed, 7 May 2008 00:10:29 EDT, AF6AY wrote:

The AN/PRC-25 was solid-state except for the single vacuum tube
in the PA. AN/PRC-77 was its fully solid-state version. Both
were VHF with channelized tuning (considered abhorent by a few
hams) but turned out to be mainstays for Vietnam field radio use.
Both are now obsolete.

And we will never see them on the commercial surplus market available
to hams, like the WW-II stuff was decades earlier.

If I had been asked to make a choice of whether they _should_ be
available, I'd probably have shaken my head sadly and said "No". Given
that the PRC-25 covered not only the Low-VHF public safety bands and
some TV frequencies, but also the aircraft marker-beacon channel, as
well as six meters, I'd have to (reluctantly) agree with whomever else
said "No" in this case.

It's a shame, but it's also easy to understand: the FCC was _very_ badly
burned by the Citizen's Band fiasco, and I'd bet other government
bureaucrats in and out of the military had that fresh in their minds as
Vietnam was winding down and the PRC-25's were filling up warehouses.

73, Bill W1AC

--
Bill Horne

(Remove QRM from my address for direct replies.)

Bill Horne wrote:
Phil Kane wrote:
And we will never see them on the commercial surplus market available
to hams, like the WW-II stuff was decades earlier.

It's a shame, but it's also easy to understand: the FCC was _very_ badly
burned by the Citizen's Band fiasco, and I'd bet other government
bureaucrats in and out of the military had that fresh in their minds as
Vietnam was winding down and the PRC-25's were filling up warehouses.

It's really more simple than that actually. At the end of World
War Two, every one thought, "Well, that's the end of that. There
will NEVER be another war now."

The military planners were looking at another 8 years of combat
in the Pacific and on the island of Japan to bring a conclusion
to World War Two. When the second atomic bomb was dropped, Japan
threw in the towel and quit.

With the rather sudden end of the war with Japan, that left stocks
for the planned additional 8 years of warfare with no place to use
it.

So there really was more "war surplus" stuff available at the end
of World War Two.

Most of the equipment used in Europe was left behind or just thrown
off of ships etc rather than bring it back. Or we would still be
seeing equipment for sale.

By the time Vietnam was over, the military, having found themselves
fighting an enemy that didn't have any problems using our own
equipment, they decided "No, that's not gonna happen again" and the
move towards "demilitarizing" equipment rather than just auctioning
it off by the pallet, or disposing it like the last time around.

Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi