Summary of the NARCC Board meeting - Saturday, July 11, 2009

by Dave Platt, AE6EO, SPECSRA

The NARCC special meeting convened just after 10 AM.  Attendance was good - around 80 people, over 125 organization reps or their proxies.  A quorum was confirmed, there were introductions and a brief speech on change by NARCC President Sue Allred, the minutes of the May meeting were read and accepted, and Old Business was begun.

The one item of Old Business was the set of two-meter repeater-subband refarming proposals tabled at or submitted after the May meeting. There were 12 proposals in all - the three originally offered by the NARCC Technical Committee, and nine submitted by member organizations.  The SPECSRA proposal was #9.

The first motion made from the floor was to proceed immediately to consider proposal #7 ("no change to the current channel plan").  This idea was debated for around 45 minutes, with various people speaking either in favor of or against the idea of an immediate vote on this one proposal.  The vote was held, and passed by a significant majority.

Another motion was then made from the floor, for a vote to study the issues involved in reorganization of the 2-meter repeater sub-bands for a period of three years, with no formal action to be taken during this period.  After a period of debate, this proposal was also voted on, and passed with a majority.

There seemed to be a strong feeling that many NARCC members feel that *something* needs to be done to enable people who want to set up 2-meter repeaters to do so... but no agreement on *how* this should be done.  Several possibilities were discussed or at least mentioned - setting up repeaters outside of the current repeater sub-bands, narrowing frequency allocations, encouraging or requiring mostly-inactive repeaters to share their frequency allocations/coordinations, identifying "paper repeaters" which are not actually on the air and revoking their coordinations, etc.

None of these possibilities seem to be imminent... I expect that they (and others) will be considered during the three-year study period. It was agreed that the NARCC board should seek legal advice as to what NARCC's actual powers are, with regard to altering or revoking existing repeater coordinations.

The board actively solicited members to sign up on one or more of several lists:  people looking for technical assistance, people with technical expertise willing to "Elmer" those in need, and people with interest and expertise in spectrum use and management issues... the latter with an eye towards revitalizing the NARCC Spectrum Committee, I believe.

The meeting was adjourned by vote of the membership at around 1:15.