[RTTY] ARRL BOD minutes and NAQP RTTY QRM

[Tim Shoppa]

> Create a 10 kHz Technician Digital Subband with a limit of 200 watts in
the
> 80m, 40m, and 15m bands. Digital modes would be limited to RTTY and
> PSK. The subbands would be 3,600-3,610 kHz (moving the bottom of the
> Extra phone band to 3,610 kHz), 7,115- 7,125 kHz, and 21.190-21.200 MHz.

There's some good connotations in this proposal, and some bad connotations.
My gut reaction:

I'd be all for expanding RTTY on 80M. Right now anything above 3600 is
forbidden to US RTTY although it does get pressed into service by EU hams
in the big RTTY contests as there's no space left lower on 80M.

>From a band planning perspective, 7115-7125 and 21190-21200 are oddball
places.

An overall good trend that I'd like to read into the proposal: I'd like to
read it as promoting widely-used, well-documented, unencrypted,
not-commercially-proprietary ham digital modes to being the "First class"
users in the digital band plan. PSK and RTTY are examples here of "first
class" digital modes. I don't personally like PSK contesting but it'd be
hard to deny that PSK is widely used, well-documented, unencrypted, and not
proprietary to any commercial entitiy.

I think the proposal does have a flaw in the impression it might leave on
folks, that those narrow slivers are the only places that are primary for
RTTY. That would be a bad impression to make.

Any proposal that marginalizes (even just through simple omission) the
proprietary automatic digital modes can be good. These can never be thought
of as "first class" users of spectrum. If they really have to exist, they
should be jammed into some really obscure tiny corner of the band plan and
not allowed to ever come out of that hell-hole.

I say that with the recent memory of automatic unattended broadband
ALE-type digital modes that were trying to start up underneath me on 3583
in RTTY NAQP. It was like a buzzsaw as it was trying to start up -
completely debilitating to a wide swath of prime RTTY spectrum. I think
K9CT also noted similar QRM in his 3830 post. If anyone else experienced
automatic-mode-digital-QRM in NAQP RTTY please write up the details while
it is still fresh in your memory, we need to document how this stuff tries
to start up on obviously occupied frequencies.

Tim N3QE