According to a letter from the law office of A. Nathan Zeliff to Lorina Pisi, an official with the California Department of Fire and Forestry, the state is demanding that Ham radio operators either remove repeater equipment that sits atop various mountainous regions throughout the state or begin paying Cal Fire thousands of dollars per year, per repeater, to keep them in place.
California to ban use of all Ham radio repeaters unless operators pay the state massive fees
HAM Radio is guilty of not being under the control of the State, not generating revenue for the State and being an effective means of communications, specially when disaster strikes. I know I have several readers that are hardcore HAM operators and can give you all chapter and verse how not only they have been successfully self-regulating themselves, but paying for every piece of equipment from their own pockets, including repeaters that are used by any HAM operator. But the biggest fault of all for the State of California is that they are independent and that cannot be tolerated.
Here is the email sent to the owner of a HAM repeater:
“Hello [name deleted]:
I do understand and appreciate all of the service you have provided in the past. However, with constantly changing technological advances, there is no longer the same benefit to State as previously provided. Therefore, the Department no longer financially supports HAM operators radios or tenancy. If you desire to enter into a formal agreement to operate and maintain said equipment, you must complete and submit attached collocation application along with fee as outlined on page one of application.
There is cost associated with getting an agreement in place. In addition to the technical analysis fee ($2500/application), there is DGS Lease admin cost associated (typically between $3000-$5000) with preparation of lease. Also, there will be an annual rent charge based upon equipment type/space.
Please let me know how you wish to proceed. If you determine the cost is too great to proceed, please make arrangements with me to remove equipment. If you still have questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I am much more readily available via email.
Lorina Pisi
T&V Manager
CAL FIRE
Technical Services – Lands
P.O. Box 944246
Sacramento, CA 94244-246
This is insane. This is not to “regulate the unregulated” but to remove HAM Radio from existence in California. And if you are dumb enough to pay for it, even better: we get a revenue-generating slave of the State.
This will get people killed, including rescue personnel who may use HAM radio repeaters as back up for their communications. If you read the letter sent by the California Department of Fire and Forestry, you will find example after example where HAM radio ws a part of emergency efforts for the people of the State Of California. Why would they choose to risk the lives of people over a few square feet of land? Then there is this faction of people that believe humans are a virus attacking Mother Gaia and need to be eliminated.
The No Agenda Show podcast with Adam Curry and John C Dvorak (both HAMs) discussed this on show 1181. See below.
http://adam.curry.com/html/NoAgendaEpisode1181S-2zVnhmlzzzxtjR0TXSLqR7XgPnD3Mv.html#tabno-agenda-episode-1181—
“I saw this in several recent postings but cound not find anything from the source. The original issue appears to be related to one repeater that was improperly located on a State-owned site.
“The original situation is over a repeater system not authorized to be in the State-owned radio site where it is/was. The State agency had no reason to fund the repeater site costs and suggested the individual make proper application and submit fees to be approved to stay at the site.
That said — amateur radio is NOT dead in California, “the State” is NOT trying to kill it off, no one in any agency with a relationship to ham radio is against it. Simply, tax payer dollars are just not available to pay for everyone’s/anyone’s repeater site. That is all.”
Don’t know about Cali, around here repeaters are typically located on Federal land or private property. Many are co-located with existing commercial or government facilities. Regarding “technological advances” eliminating the benefit of ham radio, see what happens with the next disaster. This sounds more like a Mafia shakedown for cash, rather than an attempt to “regulate” ham radio which is already regulated by the Feds.
I’ve also seen that Cali wants PG&E to pay a fine (to the state I’m sure) of $100 per person for the recent blackouts Next thing you know they’ll be charging an exit fee to leave the state. F ’em. Extend the wall around Cali, and keep the idjits away from the rest of us.
The state is going to fine them for a situation the state created?
I think someone in the CA Legislature watched Red Dawn and figured out that if CW2 happens, HAM Radio will how the Resistance communicates once they shut down the cell phone grid.
I remember way back when, before The Internet was a thing, we used RTTY or Radio TeleType to do communications. Some people had these big old TTYs where they pressed a key and the radio sent the magic bits and everybody that received that code punched out a matching letter.
My friend, who was a HAM operator, had a computer (Apple II) hooked up to do the same things as that TTY.
We were able to bounce signals 1000s of miles. And there were repeater units all over the place. We were restricted to using some weird code (not morse, not ASCII) IIRC but it all just worked.
I’m pretty damn sure that if the Feds tried to shut down the internet, we techies would have it back up and running in short order. We don’t need much for most things. It is only the big things, videos and software and such, that require the modern Internet backbone.
All of the hard parts have already been figured out.
IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549)
This is a for real protocol even if presented as an April Fools joke. The point being that we can transmit packets over just about anything.
You can’t stop the signal.
RFC 2549 led to some research and development into small packet, high-latency networking that, from what I’ve read, has been used for recent space probes. Even geek jokes can drive tech advances.
Cellular communication and the like works great when power is available, or for a few days after it goes away. Beyond that, not so much. Under overload it falls apart. If the base stations fail, it stops working.
Ham radio is one of the few non-military communication systems that doesn’t depend on complex and fragile infrastructure. See Katrina. Or the hurricane that devastated the Bahamas a few months ago, taking down all the cell towers.
On “can transmit over just about anything”, it may have been hams who demonstrated Wifi transmission — supposedly “short range” over a 150 mile span. That may have taken some amplifiers. With just upgraded antennas I’m pretty sure you can do a dozen miles or so.
–ni1d
When I lived in Phoenix, the local ham repeater club had a number guys who worked for Motorola. One meeting a guy brought in a device the size of a brick that he was working on, he called a cellular telephone. The rest, I think, was history.
The FCC is very strict on allowing lawful equal access to the airwaves. CA will get pounded if they try this.
I used to work on 2-way radios. My dad had a radio business from 1964 to 1998. We had commercial repeaters on hills privately owned. They were good for covering 80 percent of the state a couple of our customers were doctors, they had radio telephones in their cars. We knew some ham guys. The hams have repeaters all over hell. Many on private land . They can find ways around alot of issues. Califruits is desperate for money, all those wonderful socialist programs have to be paid for by somebody. I see more and more money sucking laws for them. They are circling the drain.