APRS

Zero Retries 0177

2024-11-08 — Disintermediation In Amateur Radio, 220 MHz Amp Suitable for Use with SD Transmitters, Amateur Television - in a 100 kHz Channel?, APRS Local Info Initiative, HuskySat Lab Update

Steve Stroh N8GNJ

— 31 min read
Zero Retries 0177

Zero Retries is an independent newsletter promoting technological innovation that is occurring in Amateur Radio, and Amateur Radio as (literally) a license to experiment with and learn about radio technology. Radios are computers - with antennas! Now in its fourth year of publication, with 2200+ subscribers.

About Zero Retries

Steve Stroh N8GNJ, Editor

Jack Stroh, Late Night Assistant Editor Emeritus

In this issue:

Web version of this issue - https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0177

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Commentary by Editor Steve Stroh N8GNJ

My thanks to Edward Mitchell KF7VY for renewing as an Annual Paid Subscriber to Zero Retries this past week!

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Rough Week… Leading to a Rough Rest of Decade

It’s been an intense week for those of us in the US with our various national elections. I can’t think of a Zero Retries angle to discuss the new US political realities, so I won’t.

However, looking ahead, regardless of our individual political leanings, I speculate that Amateur Radio will be impacted by change of administrations, and a change of perspective about radio technology within the US government.

  • The FCC will be changed because the makeup of the FCC is traditionally two Democrat commissioners, two Republican commissioners, and the FCC Chair is chosen by the current administration1. The current FCC has been “consumer leaning”, implementing many reforms, including Docket 16-239, the major change in the Amateur Radio HF bands in eliminating descriptions of data modes and enacting a 2.8 kHz maximum bandwidth for data modes. When that change was enacted, the FCC requested comments about whether similar changes should be enacted on the Amateur Radio VHF / UHF bands and the majority of the responses were favorable for doing so. There’s no timetable for this “Part 2” of Docket 16-239 to be completed, and I fear that the FCC will be so busy in the new administration, revising many policies of the previous administration, that we may well never see the completion of the 16-239 changes for VHF / UHF.

  • Another change I fear from the FCC is that the new administration may well be much more receptive to changes proposed by NextNav for the 902-928 MHz band in FCC Docket 24-240. If NextNav’s Docket 24-240 proposal is enacted, NextNav has made a business case and has promised (?) massive investment in new radio technology infrastructure, and revenue for their proprietary services. Amateur Radio being a secondary priority in this reconfiguration of 902-928 MHz may find the band effectively unusable, especially for traditional analog FM repeaters.

  • A primary promise of the new administration is that significant new tariffs will be imposed on imported goods from China. I’ll guess that one of the primary effects of this new policy will be that inexpensive electronic units, especially semi-customized units won’t be nearly as inexpensive, or as available, as they have been in the past. If you’re thinking of buying a radio or other unit made in China, particularly those sold direct by Chinese manufacturers, I suggest buying it now.

  • One tiny, potential improvement from the change of administration might be (and admittedly, this is a stretch) an increase in radio technology that is not just designed in the US, but perhaps manufactured in the US, similar to what happened when Chinese vendors such as Huawei were disallowed for use in US telecom infrastructure, which created more business for other vendors. This isn’t a total stretch… both FlexRadio and Elecraft manufacture their high end HF radios here in the US. Alternatively, Chinese electronics manufacturers might follow the example of Chinese manufacturers of battery electric vehicles proposing to build manufacturing plants in Mexico to take advantage of the (currently in force) North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That said, the US / Mexico relationship, and NAFTA, may well be due for a shakeup from the new administration.

But mostly, I fear that in this new administration, radio technology businesses of all kinds will be emboldened to make the argument, as NextNav just did for the 902-928 MHz band, that Amateur Radio and other non-primary users of various bands, should be subject to being downsized / de-prioritized, or simply de-allocated in favor of speculative new radio services in the name of national security or simply potentially profitable new services. For example, if Amateur Radio can effectively share 420-450 MHz with various US government services, likely a well-funded new commercial service could make the case that they could operate in 420-450 MHz as effectively as Amateur Radio does now.

Thus, there has never been as strong an imperative as there will be in the rest of this decade to use our Amateur Radio VHF / UHF spectrum more fully, and demonstrate and document that usage. If we don’t, we could quite possibly have it reallocated for “higher and better” commercial usage. Many will say that this is scaremongering, and Amateur Radio has lived with such threats for many decades now.

To that stance, I posit that the situation really is different now. One prominent example of how different the situation is - in the era of Instant Broadband Connectivity, Nearly Everywhere, via Starlink, I posit that Amateur Radio’s role in emergency communications is increasingly diminished in favor of those who can show up with a Starlink user terminal (especially the highly portable Starlink Mini), power it, and configure its Wi-Fi or plug into its Ethernet port, to provide direct Broadband Internet in emergency situations. Thus Amateur Radio needs a better justification, or at least better usage of its various VHF / UHF bands, to justify its continued usage of those bands.

One way to do so is to embark on a broad, and rapid campaign to revitalize FM repeaters, and significantly increase the usage of those repeaters, by equipping them with Multi Mode Digital Voice Modems (MMDVMs) which will enable those repeaters to not only be compatible with all Digital Voice modes, but also data capability using the new MMDVM-TNC data modes. For more detail on MMDVM-TNC, see Zero Retries 0175 - MMDVM-TNC is (Kind of) Real. That US Amateur Radio has built a strong network of VHF / UHF repeaters nationwide is a little-recognized “superpower” of Amateur Radio, and that capability will be considerably strengthened if data via repeater capabilities become widely available.

Another is Amateur Radio’s increasingly tenuous allocations at 1.2 GHz, 2.3 / 2.4 GHz, 5.4 GHz, and 10 GHz. We know very well how to build “repeater” systems for these bands because we’ve done so on various satellites, and a few very technically capable Amateur Radio clubs have put up systems on these bands on mountains. But that knowledge is specialized and hard to find (not widely shared - try to find a good explanatory article about “groundsats”), and especially hard to replicate. There is potential (however tenuous) for additional satellite payloads, or perhaps even small dedicated satellites, in geosynchronous orbit over the Americas for use by Amateur Radio and using the 2.3, 5.4, and 10 GHz bands. If we don’t do so soon… we may lose the ability to do so at all because of minimal usage of these bands invites commercial sharing at best, reallocation at worst.

This newest, more urgent get organized for using it so we don’t lose it activity may well sound like a primary activity / justification for large, established organizations that, in theory, could organize such work. But there hasn’t been much progress on these issues by the larger, existing organizations. There is no “American (or North American) Repeater Association” that coordinates repeaters on a national / continental basis, or helps to create new repeaters, or provides standards for repeater capabilities, or recommends new technical capabilities such as MMDVM retrofits, etc. And, at the moment, there’s no noticeable activity occurring in North America for an Amateur Radio GEO payload / satellite; what activity there is are proposals for such a capability by the European Space Agency.

But in reality, existing, larger organizations haven’t demonstrated much progress. Thus… the pressure (impatience) for disintermediation of those organizations, and their traditional roles and functions, is growing - see the following article.

Have a great weekend, all of you co-conspirators in Zero Retries Interesting Amateur Radio activities!

Steve N8GNJ

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Disintermediation In Amateur Radio

By Steve Stroh N8GNJ

This article is admittedly going to discuss a very particular (and probably singular), wonky, abstract, big picture of Amateur Radio from my perspective. If your interests in Amateur Radio are “just having fun”, or one particular or a handful of specific modes of Amateur Radio, feel free to skip this discussion.

In Zero Retries, I’ve struggled to offer a “unified” explanation of what I’ve been observing with the growing technological innovation in Amateur Radio, and the simultaneous decline of influence and relevance of various organizations centered in Amateur Radio. In my earliest compositions of this article I called it the “atomization” of Amateur Radio, but with the help of my late friend Dewayne Hendricks WA8DZP, I finally discovered a good framework for the explanation - disintermediation.

In the aftermath of WA8DZP’s death, an acquaintance of his mentioned this brief YouTube video:

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