Louis Kim Kline writes:
>Wouldn't it be cool if we could get them to open up the 4 meter band for 
>ham radio?  It'll probably never happen, but it would be nice to have a 
>shot at working the Europeans when the MUF gets really really high...

	To do that, they would need to move all the folks up or
down who are presently in that band.

	There are a lot of low-power and point-to-point services
in the 72-76 MHZ band in the United States. I have actually
listened to those frequencies during the occasional killer
Sporadic E opening and there are gobs of signals.

	Most are point-to-point links in which a paging
transmitter sends paging signals to multiple repeaters whose
input is that frequency and whose output is something like 150
MHZ. Oklahoma City used to have such a system and I once even
heard skip from the Southeast United States keying up the
various local paging repeaters around here. There was voice
paging going on at that time and one could hear the distant
signals full-quieting in the paging repeaters.

	Somebody, once, even had a radio reading service for the
blind on one of the 4-meter channels but it wasn't in long
enough for me to tell who it was.

	When I used to live closer to the OSU football stadium,
the Cowboy Football Network had a cueuing transmitter on
72.something MHZ. You could hear the game audio interrupted by
commands to staff who were broadcasting the game. It's kind of
weird to listen to.

	There are also lots of radio-controlled model channels
in that band so lots of people would need to move. Also, 75.0
MHZ is an aircraft beacon frequency.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group