Your WAR, Inc. board continues to work on policy updates to streamline operations and bring more benefit to you, the repeater owner or operator. Among these changes is updating the process on how we coordinate a repeater as well as providing more transparency to this process. As we begin work on this, I wanted to provide a brief note on the addition or change of emission type of a coordinated repeater system.
As most of you are aware, the past decade or so has brought greatly expanded availability of digital voice technology to the arena of ham radio repeaters. Whether it’s a re-purposed APCO Project 25 (P25) or DMR equipment or a proprietary ham radio technology like D-STAR or System Fusion, these “new” emission types have generally not been taken into consideration by many coordination bodies as part of the process. WAR, Inc. would like to take this opportunity to announce that not only are we revising how we determine a new coordination for these operational modes, but that we also need to be advised when an existing repeater that is already coordinated is modified to utilize these emission types.
Because of the significant differences in transmitted bandwidth and characteristics of the various digital emissions, and the impacts on co-channel and adjacent channel users, it’s imperative that a revised coordination request is submitted to WAR so that we can process the changes and re-run coverage studies with the new emission type(s) accounted for.
In the near future, I’ll provide another brief article on some of the technical challenges associated with spectrum management, coordination and the methodologies we use in making decisions when you submit a coordinator request to us.
Jim Westover KB9KBK
Vice-Chairman