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

[N4AOF]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Dodson" <ka4map at ispky.com>
> The SERA Board voted recently to require tone squelch (CTCSS or DCS) -
> both on transmit and receive - on all new coordinations, and on
existing
> repeaters by July, 2006.

> Folks, tone squelch is our friend, not an enemy!

>  SERA will no longer be
> entertaining gripes of a repeater being interefence plagued, if that
> machine is not using some type of tone squelch after July, 2006.

The decision is generally a good one, but it does introduce some
problems that the amateur community needs to think about and find
solutions that meet our needs and expectations.

1. Tone squelch does nothing to solve the repeater co-interference
problem if the two repeaters happen to use the same tone. SERA simply
telling everyone to "use tone" doesn't solve the problem.  They will
need to track WHICH tone each repeater uses to assist repeater owners in
selecting an appropriate tone.

2. We need a way to inform hams which tone each repeater uses.  This is
a real problem for hams who travel.

3. While you are right that tone (at least encode) is a feature "on all
models that were made the last many years" there are many rigs still in
perfectly good service that are capable of only one tone at a time -- 
this is also true of virtually all the add-on solutions for older rigs.
Such radios or add-ons can be configured to use tone, but they use the
same tone on all frequencies.  Yes, newer ham rigs save the tone setting
separately for each memory channel; but the date that became common is
more recent than many think.

4. There are good reasons why many hams use commercial radios instead of
ham rigs on VHF and UHF (you probably do so yourself Ron).  The one
shortcoming of commercial rigs is that they are typically "less
versatile" than ham rigs because commercial users aren't supposed to
need to tinker with so many settings.  MANY commercial radios only
support a choice between Tone or No-Tone -- with the Tone setting
applying both Encode AND DECODE.  You said "Folks, tone squelch is our
friend, not an enemy!"  Let me offer instead that for individual
repeater users: Tone encode is our friend, tone decode is not.

5. The use of tone squelch requires some education among the amateur
community -- especially among that group of hams who are most difficult
to educate (us old timers).

- Tone squelch requires pausing after keying the mike.  Otherwise the
first word (or more) will be cut off because it does take the tone
squelch some (small) amount of time to operate.

- If using tone decode, you need to open the squelch manually to check
the frequency before transmitting -- many new ham rigs don't even
include a convenient way to do this.  (And no one ever bothers doing it
even when it is easy).

6. Tone does NOT eliminate interference if the repeaters OR the users
actually are within range of each other -- at best tone hides the
problem somewhat.