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Spectrum refarming seals end to dealer participation in customer choice The Spectrum Refarming Docket boondoggle originally created by former Private Radio Bureau Chief Ralph Haller is re-emerging in force. Be certain it will ensure radio communications dealers a permanent massive crop failure not unlike that experienced by Oklahoma Dust Bowl farmers during the 1930s depression period.
John Steinbeck’s 1937-era novel The Grapes of Wrath depicted the Oklahoma farmers’ loss of their homes through ensuing bank foreclosures and their moving to California for a new start only to endure further suffering. Is there a difference between today’s dealers and the aggrieved farmers in the 1930s?
Yes. The farmers had no choice; the radio communications equipment sales and service dealers do, but will not have the courage to fight it.
This was shown in the late 1980s when more than 8,000 radio communications dealers laid down, rolled over and weren’t even thrown a bone by the victorious lobby groups who then turned these dealers into their passive not-for-pay sales force.
Grapes of Wrath? Are you kidding? It has been ten years now, and these dealers are still taking money from their customers and participating in forcing them to pay money for alleged unlawful monopoly “frequency coordination” services.
The 1986 FCC Docket 83.737 elimination of radio system users’ choices for frequency coordination precluded the time-honored field survey method. The FCC created favored monopoly coordinators for hire whose only true qualification for monopoly status was their unfounded claim to representative voice of each of the user 22 Private Radio Service frequency blocks.
More than 8,000 dealers, many even though members of these organizations, soon found the “representatives'” true color and their membership value when their coordination service bills jumped to more than 400%.
The irony of it all is for some time now, as predicted, any person can purchase a quarterly regional CD disc with complete, exact licensee data for only $99, which enables free enterprise local and area frequency coordinations.
Well dealers, “What ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
Enjoy your crop failure.
Merrill T. See Kalamazoo, MI
Editor’s note: We’ve heard from two sharp-eyed readers, Arch Doty of Fletcher, NC, and Jay Thompson of California (San Diego-area fax number) about our proofreading for February’s “Technically Speaking” column. Captions for Figures 2 and 4 should refer to a 75V feedpoint impedance for the antenna, not a 75W impedance.
Thompson also points out that the difference between 931.7125MHz and 931.6875MHz actually is 25kHz, not the 250kHz figure that slipped past us, reaching print in paragraph six on page 34 in David Ludvigson’s article about paging receivers.
Thanks to you both for the careful reading and for letting us know. _Don Bishop
Clarification In the March 1997 feature “Multiprotocol Trunking and Networking,” by Craig S. Johnson, two different working switches manufactured by SmartLink, Raleigh, NC, are described. The smaller of the two switches was described as handling as many as five sites and 50 channels. After the issue had gone to press, it was learned the smaller switch now handles as many as 32 sites and 50 channels.
