Starfish Community

A local emergency management professional shared this link with me. It appears that proposed changes could hamper training and general interaction with volunteers via Amateur Radio.

http://n5fdl.com/97113/

Any thoughts on this?

FCC Rules Hamper Amateur Radio’s Public Safety Efforts

Executive Summary

The FCC has recently stated that professional public safety workers—including firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and other personnel—may not use Amateur Radio to communicate on behalf of their agencies except during actual emergencies.

This means that a firefighter who coordinates a city’s RACES program cannot during normal times use Amateur Radio to talk with volunteers about the program. Nor may the paid professional participate....

There has been an age old debate about spectrum utilization and what the amateur radio service actually is supposed to entail. There is a fair amount of animosity among some who feel the EMCOMM bunch is "taking over" ham radio. Despite the fact that 97.1(a) says:

Recognition and enhancement of the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communication service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications.

I certainly also recognize, as someone who has been involved with radio for nearly a decade, the fears of those who want to strongly enforce part 97.113 to the bone. It is no laughing matter that if our service becomes a means for "business" communication (for profit, or non-profit) the FCC will auction it off or simply make it spectrum for that purpose. We have to be careful with keeping to our roots.

The EMCOMM bunch hold to 91.1(a) but often times fail to see there is a (b)(c)(d) and (e) which have nothing to do with emergency communications. Regardless, I feel we have to have a balance and we have to make sure that we can continue to effectively provide a service while still keeping the hobby alive.

There has been a recent incident where a television station was fined because they used amateur radio during bad weather to obtain information for their broadcast. This according to the FCC was considered pecuniary interest because the TV station stands to benefit from this kind of reporting. I strongly disagree, the information received by amateur radio operators through the partnership with the National Weather Service and trained storm spotters which is relayed to television stations can save lives, there should be clear exemptions in 97.113 to allow this kind of activity.

This creates some interesting questions for the operations of HISG. It could be argued that if I gathered information for a situation report during a disaster response event that HISG could benefit from that by providing that information and drawing interest among people which could ultimately lead to a donation. I know it sounds far fetched, but if they fined the weather station than who knows.

Previously, before the FCC became under new management, I was under the impression that as long as I wasn't getting paid to make radio communications than I would be okay. And also if it was during an actual emergency it wouldn't matter. I am starting to doubt this and will continue to seek clarification.

One thing I will point out, we talked about wanting to maybe do a Starfish Community Amateur Radio Net with Don Wilson, myself and some others. This makes me wonder if according to the FCC we would be in violation of 97.113.

Here is a link to the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) position on this issue:

http://www.arrl.org/news/files/ARRL_AppropriateUseGuidelines.pdf

I believe that it is imperative that the Amateur bands be protected from commercialized encroachment ... specifically because of the extreme importance and benefit of their use during times of risk to life, health and property. I also believe that those benefits are drastically diminished when Amateurs are not allowed to train and exercise the use of the Amateur bands for those purposes in realistic ways ... during training programs, drills and exercises.

There is a solution which offers the opportunity for training and skill development without "watering-down" the needed protection.

The solution will be derived when these ideas and objectives are viewed as mutually-beneficial instead of mutually-exclusive.

This post was edited by a moderator February 2010.

You are completely right Dewey. I think that we can all share the bands and utilize them. The problem here isn't amateur radio operators using the bands for training, the problem is employees of fire departments and emergency services getting paid and operator amateur radio. What I would argue is they aren't using the radio in pecuniary interest as they are using it to train for real situations. This is what I would like the FCC to see.