[CQ-Contest] OO reports

[Michael Keane, K1MK]

Of course our behavior as a group is highly predictable, otherwise a variant of this discussion wouldn't recur each year...

Every time the topic does comes up, one thing that strikes me is the degree of arbitrariness. We don't have a technical performance-based rule (-xx dBc @ +3 kHz) for how close we can get to the band edge. We have an absolute prohibition (no emission out of band). That's a rule with which it may lierally be impossible for anyone to ever transmit a signal and still be in compliance (think about transmitted phase noise). 

"Good practices" may suggest 3 kHz but there's no black and white, right or wrong, how close is too close; 14347.00 minus epsilon doesn't absolutely guarantee that I'm on the side of the angels and 14347.00 plus epsilon isn't necessarily going to run me afoul of the Feds (I'd agree that 14348.5 or 7150.00 are horses of a different color). If anything, adopting a de facto standard of 3 kHz is quite generous and affords ourselves a substantial benefit of the doubt.

Getting an advisory notice about adherence with this conventional wisdom is not in any way inappropriate, unjustified or unfair. It may serve as an important and useful reminder. But to anyone cognizant of the subtlety and ambiguity in the FCC rules, receiving such a notice doesn't convey very much in the way of new or useful information on which to act.

If this were to happen to me, I hope I'd been fully aware that calling someone on 14346.97 was getting pretty darn close to the functional definition of the "band edge". Under those circumstances, a valuable notice would be one that informed me that I'd actually been heard out of band; an irrelevant notice is one that informs me that I worked a station that was on 14347.03 sent by somebody who was busy logging notices to check any further for a more definitive infraction.

If an implication of these notices this is how FCC Monitoring went about issuing their citations in the past? Well, that's very interesting but how relevant might that be today?  

73,
Mike K1MK
k1mk at alum.mit.edu

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