To help cope with potential problems during the rear 2000 rollover, WICEN, a EMERGENCY RESPONSE PLAN registered communications provider, are to be put on standby to provide supplementary communications to major facilities (Police, ambulance, fire brigade etc.) WICEN make extensive use of all modes of communications and have built a number of portable repeaters operating in the UHF band which has the potential to be severely compromised by devices operating under the LIPD legislation. In many areas, and in particular with portable repeaters, UHF repeaters are preferred by WICEN as they are quick to deploy and do not suffer the intermodulation problems caused by very powerful adjacent band paging transmitters now suffered by amateur VHF equipment.
Because of the need for quick deployment of these repeaters, LIPD transmitters pose a considerable hazard as they add an un-calculable risk to the reliability of these systems which could have disastrous results. Consider this scenario. One of WICEN’s portable repeaters may need to be deployed to assist with a particular problem. Once the repeater is deployed, a person using the third channel of a recently released LIPD transceiver being sold by a major electronics retailer, if operating close enough to the repeater, could severely disrupt communications without the person even knowing that they are doing so. These radios have no ability to monitor the repeater output, so if the person was not able to pick up the transmissions from the WICEN station directly, either because of location or because of this particular radio’s selective calling feature, they would be totally unaware that they were causing such interference.
There has been talk recently about the
possibility of inverting the repeaters (swapping of input and output frequencies)
as a way around the problems that the LIPD legislation is causing. This
simply shifts the problem and doesn’t in any way solve it. The amount of
work involved in inverting an already established repeater is quite involved,
especially if it is linked to other sites. The work involved in inverting
more than 100 repeaters throughout the country in the time available is
virtually impossible. Added to this, the confusion in operating procedures
and modifications required to an un-definable amount of user equipment
and you have the potential to significantly add to, rather than detract
from, any problems associated with Y2K. Inverting repeaters at this crucial
time as a band-aid solution is potentially disastrous!