Wisconsin Association of Repeaters

Greetings! I want to get you up to speed on what your board has been up to. I know it seems like we’ve been pretty quiet, but to be honest we’ve been more active than we’ve been in many years.

The Board of Directors has been meeting at least twice a month since March, working to create proposed changes to our policy and by-laws for members to review and ultimately vote on.

Why all the work? Well, as we started to plow through our agenda at the first meeting, it was obvious that our policy and by-laws were outdated and not very functional. It was my feeling that any of the cosmetic changes we were discussing would really be meaningless without a strong foundation to build upon. So we made the decision to forego (for now) coordination updates and many of the formalities of years past while we work on these difficult but wholesale changes to how we conduct business.

As of this writing, we are 99% finished with the proposed policy changes, and we have a meeting scheduled in November to hammer out the proposed bylaw changes. Right after that meeting takes place we’ll be posting the proposals here, and sending out snail mail to our members asking to review them.

Here’s the important part: We need YOU to participate. Look at the documents. Review them. Ask questions. We will be asking the membership to vote on the changes at our next membership meeting in March 2017. It is important that we get these changes done so that we can put our organization back on track and get back to the bigger non-policy changes and ideas that we have for the future.

As I’ve said in the beginning, my goal as the current Chairman is to be able to hand off a strong, focused organization to the next Chairman. It should be more modern, streamlined, and in tune to the spectrum challenges we face in the future. I don’t look at my term as Chairman as ceremonial. I look
at it as an opportunity to get to work and position the organization for the future.

I hope that when you see the proposed policy and by-law changes that your Board has worked on diligently to craft, you’ll agree that I met my goal.

As always, I welcome your feedback. As others have found, you’ll always get a reply from me. You can email me at: chairman@wi-repeaters.org.

Thanks and 73,
Chris, W9JOL

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

As I sit here looking forward to spending some time in Dayton for the Hamvention®, I’ve been reflecting on my first couple of months as the Chairman of WAR.

We’ve already changed a few things (for the better, I think). One of the things that was done in the past was hold a quarterly board meeting, where the board members would discuss executing the things that the membership has asked of them, as well as deal with the general health of the organization.

We had our first one a few weeks ago, and it was a doozy. It took several hours and covered a myriad of topics. At the end, I felt that we weren’t able to cover any of them very well – the old “inch deep and mile wide” syndrome.

So we decided that it was a much better idea to have more frequent, shorter, and focused meetings. Our next one is May 16th, where we will finally clarify the membership definitions and membership levels. I have set a time limit of 60 minutes to these meetings – not to rush through them, but to make sure we stay on task. Of course, if we need a few extra minutes to finish up, we’ll use them.

I think the other benefit of more frequent meetings is to keep you at the top of our minds. Four times a year (in my opinion) spreads things apart and allows us to get “out of sight, out of mind” with the organization, and good ideas eventually get forgotten. We don’t want that.

As an aside, Dave Karr and I represented WAR at the Illinois Repeater Council’s annual meeting last month. It was very helpful to see how they operate, and hear about their challenges. It’s become clear that now more than ever, the work we do is important, and that neighboring states need to work together. I was excited to find that they elected a new Chairman down there who is an old friend of mine, Greg Buchwald, K9QI. I look forward to working with him in an entirely different capacity than we had in the past (we’re both broadcast Engineers).

So, even though things seem quiet, rest assured that we are working hard to not only improve our service to you in our primary job of coordination, but also in a few other ways that may help the hobby in general. While we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we exist to coordinate repeaters, we
acknowledge that times are changing and we have the unique position of being able to provide some technical education as well. We want to make sure that you’re getting some value from your much appreciated dues.

That’s all for now. As I’ve said before, please feel free to email me about any compliments or criticisms at any time, my address is chairman@wi-repeaters.org. I promise that you will get a prompt reply from me. After all, I work for you.

Thanks and 73,
-Chris, W9JOL