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Author Topic: Remote Operation Rules Changes  (Read 71063 times)

AA4PB

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #315 on: January 31, 2015, 09:19:39 AM »

The 500m rule won't prevent the use of RHR so long as you are receiving from the same location that you are transmitting from. The rule just prevents someone from using a receiver that is at a different location than the transmitter.
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Bob  AA4PB
Garrisonville, VA

WO7R

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #316 on: January 31, 2015, 09:19:57 AM »

Quote
Does that count as a receiver for the purposes of this rule?

If it does, it affects everyone that uses a cluster, not just remote stations.  You could even argue, in an excessively lawyerly fashion, that it wipes out DX Summit.  After all you are "using" someone else's receiver.

Some clarification may be needed here; I doubt if they intended to wipe out clusters with skimmers, even local ones.

I think W6GX may have identified the proper intent -- avoid multiple transmissions from the same call sign, though given internet lags and multi-path it would be less useful than it appears to be.

This can be "lawyered" from the other side as well.  If a location doesn't transmit, is it a ham radio station to start with?  ARRL has nothing to say about a police scanner for DXCC purposes, either.  As a practical matter, it's ARRL's award, but this could get messy if someone "laywered themselves" into deciding they had no duty to disclose a non-ham location.

And, what happens if they are listening to someone else's station who makes their receive only signals available on the internet?  It doesn't even have to have a ham call sign.  The builder may not even be licensed.

We've only got started on this one.  Imagine how much messier (as AA6YQ has already suggested) an actual distance limit for the whole shebang would be.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 09:26:29 AM by WO7R »
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N5INP

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #317 on: January 31, 2015, 09:55:29 AM »

The 500m rule won't prevent the use of RHR so long as you are receiving from the same location that you are transmitting from. The rule just prevents someone from using a receiver that is at a different location than the transmitter.


But WHY?

Inside the CONUS - WHY? Who's business is it of anyone's as long as all the remoting is done inside CONUS.

See, this is what bugs me. When rules are arbitrarily set up and left long after other rules would seemingly make them an arbitrary relic. I've been told remotes is the new wave of the future for your fav award, but then we leave in rules that stop the ultimate progression of the technology. I understand we can't go realistically go back, but now I'm seeing relics of yesteryear's thinking that limit it going forward ...

WHY?
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AA6YQ

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #318 on: January 31, 2015, 10:06:15 AM »

When establishing rules, it is better to start with tight limits and later relax them if appropriate. If you instead start with loose limits, you can't later tighten them without causing trouble for some set of participants. This was the mistake made with enabling remote operation for DXCC back in 1998.

Hindsight is 20-20, and 17 years later the DXCC award program is still going strong -- so let's not get carried away...

« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 10:08:34 AM by AA6YQ »
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N5INP

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #319 on: January 31, 2015, 10:31:52 AM »

It should be ok if you are not using the SDR to tune on the DX.
73,
Jonathan W6GX

Yes Johnathon. SDRs on the web are there NOW.

Let me make this perfectly clear to people if they don't already know this. There are SDRs (receivers only) on the internet you can use FOR FREE, located in different parts of the world, close to DX, with antennas at the location your interested in.

Take Tromelin for example. I never heard them at my QTH with my own equipment. However, I could clearly hear them using an SDR on the internet, I think the one I experimented with was located in England. I could hear the operator and see the pileup on the pan display. Yes folks, I solved half my problem by using a FREE SDR on the web. Who knows if I'd tried to complete a contact by transmitting from my location? I might have gotten lucky. If it did work, nobody would ever know! And people using this technique have no record of cheating like this. Is this being done now? What do you think?

So, beware folks, if you don't already know, the toothpaste is out of the tube my friends. Way out. As more and more web SDRs come into play around the world, people can solve half of the equation sometimes, by using this method. Ham radio DX awards are in trouble, and it's just the tip of the iceberg.
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AA6YQ

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #320 on: January 31, 2015, 11:06:43 AM »

It should be ok if you are not using the SDR to tune on the DX.
73,
Jonathan W6GX

Yes Johnathon. SDRs on the web are there NOW.

And have been for several years.
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N5INP

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #321 on: January 31, 2015, 11:15:18 AM »

And have been for several years.

And ...
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WO7R

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #322 on: January 31, 2015, 11:46:25 AM »

And nobody, up to now, has cared very much.

I guess you had better sound the alarm bell, and sound it loud, because the world as you know it has come to an end.

Seventeen years ago when remoting was allowed.  Ten years ago (SDR 1000).  Two years ago (Funcube).  It's getting to be very cheap to deploy remote receivers and not terribly hard to put them on the 'net.

I suppose you're opposed to reverse beacon nets as well?  I don't recall you hitting the barricades for that one.  If anything, those would be a much bigger threat than simply giving folks unprocessed audio which they still must decode for themselves.

RBN, with the excellent skimmer software (another recent "weakening") means that we all can be everywhere at once.

In fact, if you look at your local cluster, some of the more advanced ones anyway, they (by default) filter out RBN spots because there are too many of them.

But, of course, that's just one good computer program away from being turned into Super Spotter whereby someone whispers CQ and, if they are interesting to someone, get "heard" world-wide right away.

There's just so much for you to get offended by and it will continue to grow.

So, when are you going to sell out?
« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 11:52:55 AM by WO7R »
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N5INP

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #323 on: January 31, 2015, 12:12:22 PM »

There's just so much for you to get offended by and it will continue to grow.

So, when are you going to sell out?

LOL - you still don't get it. I love all this technology. I have no problems with any of it. You should see my room here! I've got two USB SDRs, along with all sorts of technology.

The problem is when it's used to obtain the ---> AWARDS <---

As far as anything else - who cares what technology you use?

Why don't YOU buck up and say all of it is OK for DX awards? Well, you're the champion of tech in ham radio here.

Step up to the plate. Just say any and all of it can be use to obtain DX AWARDS.

WeB SDR, any location for TX, any location for RX. It's all technology. It's all good. Whatever you can do with technology is great isn't it? If I can use tech to hear a DX station in Iran, and use another to TX to it, and complete a contact, well Mr. tech - what's wrong with it? Doesn't that prove I'm a tech savvy ham? As long as I use RF in the ham bands in some form, to obtain that DX contact what's the problem?

I'll turn what you said right back to you -


"There's just so much for you to get offended by and it will continue to grow.

So, when are you going to sell out?"
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W6GX

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #324 on: January 31, 2015, 12:33:58 PM »

The 500m rule won't prevent the use of RHR so long as you are receiving from the same location that you are transmitting from. The rule just prevents someone from using a receiver that is at a different location than the transmitter.


It seems to me that there's no rule which prevents one from connecting to multiple remote stations at the same time.  In theory one could key up on all stations at once.  With Internet latency at 25ms this is technologically feasible.  Each station alone will be completely legal running no more than 1,500 watts.  Theoretically the second station will add 3db, the fourth station will add 3db more, the eighth station add another 3db more 8)

73,
Jonathan W6GX
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WO7R

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #325 on: January 31, 2015, 12:42:18 PM »

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The problem is when it's used to obtain the ---> AWARDS <---

As far as anything else - who cares what technology you use?

Oh, c'mon now, you write with great passion on this.  You talk fairly constantly about the cheapening of the awards.

The fact is, nobody but you is all that keen on this supposed boundary between what is generally allowed and what is allowed for awards.  There are and have been very few restrictions.  Mostly, if it is in the FCC regs, you can do it.  

But meanwhile, you have to face facts:  This cheapening has been going on for seventeen years.  

The horse is not only out of the barn, his issue has issue by now.

Quote
Why don't YOU buck up and say all of it is OK for DX awards?

It should be quite evident by now that I think remote operation is just fine.  I would have accepted, just for the sake of sheer compromise, some restrictions, but as AA6YQ points out, it is rather too late for that, something I myself didn't grasp until well into this my second or third thread on the topic.

For instance, a distance restriction of about a thousand miles would do a lot to avoid the most legitimate objection -- the dreaded "differential propagation" -- without making it to onerous for someone or some set of cooperative hams to find suitable land far out of town, where it is going to be cheaper.   I would be personally OK with that (though AA6YQ's objection still has merit as some number of hams are still going to be badly hurt seventeen years on after they laid out a lot of money in good faith).

Such a rule would have had weird effects on RHR, too, which I don't care for one way or another, personally, but it would have allowed remoting to thrive.

I haven't though much about remote receivers yet, but in the end, I think their value is rather limited.  So what if I can hear the DX on the east coast?  I have a nice setup here and if I can't hear it on my own rig and antennas, hearing it on the east coast simply invites me to be an alligator station.  So, I'm not terribly interested in that; the number of times I would make a QSO with a receiver in South Carolina (say) and my transmitter here in Arizona would seem to be negligible compared to the mischief I could cause.  I don't care if it is or is not allowed.  The technology is not terribly attractive to me and I think it is self-limiting.

I'm not even sure having a remote receiver in, say, northern Arizona would be that big a difference maker.  I'd want to have a transmitter there, too.  If it was outhearing my transmitter, which has an excellent antenna attached (it's receiver is great, too) then I'd want the transmitter there, too.

In any case, I don't see any need to sell out.  Unlike yourself, I'm not terribly interested in how other people get their awards -- you are.  So it's you that needs to think about selling out.  After all, this terrible state of affairs is not recent.

For seventeen years, to varying degrees, all the evils you seem to worry about have been done by who knows how many hams.  The ham apocolypse happened a long time ago.  Your awards, perhaps unknown to you before, have been cheapened for most of your ham career unless you are very old in the hobby indeed.

But I've never felt my accomplishments "cheapened" by what others do, including those who actually cheat the written rules, not the supposed "unwritten ones" you and your friends now want to make official.

What they have on the wall satisfies them, I hope, including how they got it.  But, it doesn't have to be my definition to make me happy with mine.  I know what I did and that's enough.
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WO7R

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #326 on: January 31, 2015, 12:48:27 PM »

Quote
It seems to me that there's no rule which prevents one from connecting to multiple remote stations at the same time.  In theory one could key up on all stations at once.  With Internet latency at 25ms this is technologically feasible.

I don't think it's quite that feasible.  The internet is just not that reliably predictable.  The more stations, the more chances for multi-path both from natural radio causes and differential internet delays.

I think the big problem is keying up multiple stations on different frequencies in a big pileup.  That would have, in the long run, more pernicious effects (increased chaos overall) but it would certainly, I think, be more effective for the station doing it than trying to have them all on one frequency.

Now that is a bad idea as it would give regular DXing a lot of the problems we now have with JT65 "Dxing" where (there) regular pileup behavior also falls apart because of power versus bandwidth problems.  I guess the Leauge is hoping to head that kind of behavior off.  If so, they are ahead of the rest of us -- as they may well have been all along given the allowance of remoting for so many years.

Fortunately, I think cost is going to make this more of a theoretical than a practical concern.  Not to many will be able to afford multiple remote stations and RHR doesn't seem set up to allow multiple transmitters either.  I suppose it could, but I suspect that as their business grows, that will be the last thing they want to enable as it allows one client to tie up a lot of hardware.  To keep their capital costs low, that's not good for them.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 12:52:24 PM by WO7R »
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KE4KY

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RE: Remote Operation Rules Changes
« Reply #327 on: February 01, 2015, 04:35:11 AM »

« Last Edit: February 01, 2015, 05:06:35 AM by KE4KY »
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Glenn KE4KY - Amateur Radio since 1975; Definitely, one of the deserving...
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