[GreenKeys] indulge me!

[Richard Dillman]

>I was wondering if someone could school me on some regulations about RTTY. I
>was wondering. What if I took the ITTY feed and sent it to my 1KW CCS harris
>transmitter.  I know that every 10 minutes I would need to sign.  And I know
>I couldn't always be on the same frequency. But what in there rule books
>would prevent me from doing this? Could I retransmit ITTY a few hours a day
>on 80, 40 or 20?

Why limit yourself to amateur operations with all the attendant restrictions on power, duration of transmission and broadcasting?  If it's your desire to provide an on the air RTTY news service I'd say go commercial.

There are two routes that I know of:

1. Apply for a class 1A commercial coast station license as we did at KSM (and three others have done since).  Request Morse and NBDP (narrow band direct printing) authorizations from the tables in Part 80.  We were just granted a new 6Mc frequency from that table.  Then the frequency is "yours", there's no restriction on the duration of transmission or broadcasting and you can run multi kW if you have the gear for it.

2. Apply for a limited coast station license.  Stations in this service typically use simplex SSB channels.  But there's a little known part of Part 80 that allows limited coast stations to use NBDP - and they pick their own frequencies within bands shown in the rules.  Maximum power is limited to only 1kW and the highest frequency available is just below 8Mc.  Still, with a decent antenna and judicious selection of frequency you could be widely heard.

RD

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Richard Dillman
Chief Operator, Coast Station KSM
Maritime Radio Historical Society
http://www.radiomarine.org
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