HRN 281: Your Repeater; Your Rules (FCC's Laura Smith at Pacificon)

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We haven't heard a lot from FCC Special Counsel Laura Smith lately, but she spoke at Pacificon, a large ham conference in the San Francisco area, last October. Her talk was recorded by Bob Miller WB6KWT and his son Robert KA7JKP, and Bob gave us permission to use the talk for HamRadioNow.

Gary adds a long intro, with a summary of the talk's highlights and a few comments, along with a status report on the Amateur Radio Parity Act, before we play Laura's talk in full. 

The title is a bit of click bait. Laura does actually talk about repeaters and uses that phrase, but she talks about a lot of other things, too. The headline should probably be about the plan to have ARRL Official Observers work closer with the FCC on initial investigations of complaints. We've put time-links to each of Laura's topics in the YouTube description so you can zero in on those if you want to.

HRN 280: P25 Network eXchange Repeater Linking (from the 2016 DCC)

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HRN 280 - P25 Linking POSTER square.jpg

There is life left in P25, perhaps the first somewhat popular digital voice mode on Amateur Radio VHF/UHF. The life comes from a linking system that David Krauss NX4Y introduces at the 2016 DCC. He calls it P25NX - Network Exchange.

The P25 mode started in Public Safety radio in the mid '80's. After about 10 years, those guys say their radios are due for replacement. Hams bought the trade-ins and put them on the ham bands. But the repeaters were isolated islands. D-STAR became more popular because repeaters were linked, bringing in traffic from around the country or world. P-25 is about to have even more cheap equipment on the market as they migrate to Phase 2, and David's link system could make P25 a competitive mode in ham radio again.

HRN 279: AREDN Emergency Digital Network - from the 2016 DCC

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AREDN Project Manager Andre Hansen K6AH details this mesh based data network that's up and running in the San Diego CA area. It uses the 2.4, 3.4 and 5.9 GHz ham bands to haul data across the region, and then distribute it to local users, with a primary EmComm goal.

Andre gave this talk at the ARRL & TAPR Digital Communications Conference in St. Petersburg FL in September 2016.