WIA Hosts Sydney Repeater Builders’ Forum

On Sunday 7th June, the WIA represented by Peter Young, VK3MV WIA Director and Peter Mill VK3ZPP, the WIA’s Repeater and Beacon Coordinator, hosted a forum of amateur repeater builders and maintainers. The forum was organised by the WIA to formulate options for addressing identified interference issues between repeaters along the NSW coastal areas and the need to explore future spectrum options for new digital technologies.

Not surprisingly, just like the commercial radiocommunications industry, amateur spectrum in the 2 meter VHF band and to a lesser degree in the 70cm UHF band is very congested or not available for new technologies. The forum was kicked off with a presentation from the two Peters on the issues and how other IARU Regions have tackled similar problems, which stimulated further discussion of the issues. The outcome lead to some positive steps forward for the need to explore better use of CTCSS tone code to protect FM repeaters from unwanted incidental interference, a tentative way forward to address adjacent FM channel interference issues from D-Star mobiles and the development of 12.5 kHz plans for repeaters and simplex channels for wider discussion in the amateur community.

The last meeting to discuss these sorts or issues was in Albury/Wodonga in the early 1970’s where the foundations of today’s existing band plans for repeaters were made. Time and technology moves on.

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