Well that explains why it sounded familiar :-)
I wonder how much enforcement action the FCC does for ham radio in a years time? Some statistics would be interesting. From time to time you might catch a blurb on the ARRL website.
I think generally you get a scary letter from an OO on League letterhead. Then if you ignore that you might get another Scary letter from the commission. And if you are bullheaded then that is when bad things potentially start. Basically you are given plenty of opportunities to straiten up and fly right. If it take "authority" to get a guy to clean up his act, that is pretty sad. I'd like to think and hope that is a very rare thing.
I do know of a local case in the last 10 years where a spur was in the air craft band from a 24/7 transmit ham radio remote receive site for a repeater. They must have DF'd the thing.. either way I was kind of shocked it was just a letter telling the guy to fix it or shut it of within a few week time period. And nothing more became of it because we fixed the thing. So while it sounded really bad, they were pretty friendly about thing, probably because it was non intentional.
"People trying to do meaningful things will get fed up and leave." I can relate to that! I have seen it happen many times and am always trying not to let it happen to me. "Clubs" that treat their few technical members poorly with a laundry list.
On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Michael Fox - N6MEF n6mef@mefox.org wrote:
Do you have a link to this? I'd be interested.
Uhm, I think you posted it!
http://kb9mwr.blogspot.com/2013/09/amateur-radio-in-2037.html
Since there is so little enforcement action now a days, I am not sure the question is something that I really even concern myself with. You just said Laura Smith refused to get involved in your local example.
They don't enforce judgement calls. So is it "good engineering and amateur practice" (or whatever that rule says) if I'm trying to use 25kHz and you decide you need the whole band? I guess that depends on whether they ask me or you. Were you intentionally interfering with me? Even after I let you know I was there? In our case, it was coordination vs. coordination. The rogue folks just created their own coordinating body so they could coordinate whatever they wanted, whether it made sense or not, and then claim, "hey, we're coordinated!". Never mind that others had been there for years and were active stations prior. (In one case, it was a DX spotting node for all of NorCal run by, believe or not, the ARRL Pacific Division Director!) The ARRL refused to do anything (as usual). And, since the FCC rules don't say anything about timeline, making a decision would require the application of some common sense. Evidently that's not available at the FCC.
But they do enforce black-and-white stuff (out of band, spurious, etc.). That's why I'm in favor of bandwidth limits. It can be measured easily. But I guess I'm in the minority.
It probably doesn't matter anyway. With all of the other FCC restrictions preventing new data technology and service development, the ham bands are becoming more irrelevant for data every day. And the lack of FCC enforcement, the ham bands are more like CB every day. People trying to do meaningful things will get fed up and leave. Problem solved. Isn't government wonderful!
Michael N6MEF