[KYHAM] SERA Board Votes for Mandatory Tone at Summer Board Meeting

[Wa4dby at aol.com]

Ron,

 It seems to me that SERA is requesting mandatory tone because a failure has 
occurred limiting the amount of repeaters in use on the same freq or adjacent 
freq.
How many coordinations have been check with all the states in a 100 mile 
range for  repeaters already in use? How many of us know a repeater that sits 
there with no activity while its owner uses the big club repeater in town? OK, I'm 
blowing off  steam but it's our own fault for tones being implemented. We've 
let a good thing go over board. As a first responder I am always happy to roll 
into a town with an open repeater and think there should always be some 
available. When I arrived in FT Myers with Hurricane Charlie there were 10 to 12 
different organizations that were out of town visitors. The repeater being open 
made communications much easier for different groups to move fast. Yes, I do 
have some freq with PL in the radio but with disasters you never know where you 
may go. Also the skill level with some of the folks using the radios would 
stop communications ( they might be using that radio for the first time and the 
book didn't get packed). The Salvation Army is good at many things but radio 
isn't always their strong suit. PL's only prohibit the repeater being keyed by 
far away visitors. If  the local repeater TX is keyed at the same time the 
distant repeater TX is keyed, the interference is still likely to occur. Its 
kinda of like the visiting carrier riding on the primary carrier and PL.  So I 
guess we're stuck with this solution. It's just a shame that they didn't use a 
show the need form to get another repeater up on the air. I think it's better to 
have 4 great repeaters with no interference than 50 you can't or don't use. 
My steam preasure is back to a safe level. I'll go back to simplex where at 
least for now PL's are not a problem.  

Eddie
WA4DBY