This was my response to Ria about this article. I don’t view this as some policy issue on communicating secondary privileges and what happens when a primary user interferes with us.

To me, this is actually a silly article.

They could have been interfered with by the Midwest Lasagna Eaters Net who regularly meet there every night at 0300Z who would have run them off the frequency.

It is also silly to think that we can educate every single ham on every single matter of every single aspect of the hobby.

This guy just didn’t know how to deal with QRM of his net and rather than find a solution, he shut it down. Which is also silly.

I’d agree on pulling the news piece, but not because this is some broad spectrum educational issue. It’s the story of a guy who cannot effectively handle the challenges of running a net on 40m and threw in the towel.

Nothing interesting in that…

If people agree, we’ll pull the piece.

From: arrl-odv <arrl-odv-bounces@reflector.arrl.org> On Behalf Of rjairam@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2020 4:15 PM
To: arrl-odv <arrl-odv@arrl.org>
Subject: [arrl-odv:31374] Properly informing members and the public about our shared allocations

A friend forwarded me an email he sent to his division director and didn’t get a response. I didn’t want to respond to him as I felt his director should have the opportunity to respond.

It concerns this article:

http://www.arrl.org/news/view/international-broadcast-station-interference-overwhelms-hurricane-watch-net

His concern is that we were (incorrectly in his opinion) telling members and the public that we were being interfered with by international broadcast stations which doesn’t take into account that we share the frequency with international broadcasters and they are not as frequency agile as we are. So the understanding is that while shortwave interference from international broadcasters is annoying, there is nothing we can do about it other than QSY.

Those of us who have been around awhile and who actively operate on 40 phone know that it was a lot worse before I think 2008 or so

Before 7100-7200 phone was opened up in other ITU regions.

So I’m wondering what we can do to accurately convey the status of 40 meters instead of just accusing international broadcasters of interfering with an emergency net. Frankly most of the broadcasters don’t know that we use those frequencies for emergencies and forget about getting nations like Iran, North Korea or China to QSY. And it is easier for us to QSY anyway as we have clear space below 7200 and can move around the broadcast QRM.

This also brings into the question of our public image when it comes to shared frequency allocations. When we complain publicly that the primary users are interfering with us, will the FCC later use this as evidence to simply remove our secondary or shared status outright?

TL;DR - we need to be careful about the message.

Ria

N2RJ