[drats_users] D-RATS and FCC Part 97.219d

[Kirk Talbott]

I wanted to throw this out to the D-RATS user community and possibly
KK7DS that it is well known that non-hams have been popping
up on D-RATS occasionally and I have counted at least six so far.

Here in Frederick Maryland we are trying to set up an unmanned
D-RATS Internet/RF station at our repeater site and wish to use the
automatic E-mail forwarding feature of D-RATS to gate E-mail
between D-RATS RF only stations and D-RATS Internet only stations,
a very cool feature which works well.

But there is a problem, I don’t think what we want to do is legal, but it
ought to be.  D-RATS has no system callsign authentication
and as such no way to tell a ham from a non-ham using the system.   Under
normal circumstances with Internet only D-RATS stations this isn’t
a problem, but by attaching a radio to D-RATS, having the automatic
E-mail forwarding feature of D-RATS enabled, and actually doing automatic
E-mail forwarding by an unmanned D-RATS station I believe would be
in violation of FCC Part 97.219d.   

I hope somebody can either set me straight on this or I hope it is possible
to put some type of callsign authentication scheme on D-RATS or
possibly just on our station because the automatic E-mail forwarding
feature of D-RATS with RF and Internet is just too cool to not use.  

Note we are not programmers here and couldn’t possibly do this ourselves
for our station.

73 and Happy Holidays all
KB3ONM
Kirk
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