And herein lies the problem. We have here an agent who identified the Rangemaster as 15.209 device (because he used the more restrictive field strength measurement) when it is a 15.219 TX--and the FCC did nothing to stop him. Plus the agent only targeted the one Rangemaster on the tower using the more restrictive 15.209 criteria but did not target the other transmitters
because if i read everything correctly he had the transmitters set up in a master / slave arrangement using the syncing feature. maybe hamilton could verify. if that is the case he is shut down, because the 2 slaves get their oscillator sync from the master. target the master the rest are useless.
he goes back on with the other two in non sync mode, the agent comes back out fails those and gets pissed because he had to come back guy gets a NAL.
can't win.
i refer to my original statement. once the agents get a hard on for your operation there is nothing you can do.
it's like the song i fought the law and the law won.
oh gee guess the RIAA gonna want $200.00 out of me now.
The agent cited 15.209 only because he decided that the transmitter on the tower did not comply with 15.219 (because he considered the tower to be a 40-foot "ground lead"). The NOUO clearly states that the the tower transmitter does not comply with 15.219. The agent does not even mention the other two transmitters. This is most likely because he considered them to be compliant with 15.219, and it was therefore not necessary to cite 15.209 for them. I don't know if the three transmitters were synchronized.
I've seen a lot of confusion about 15.209 on this and other websites. Here is the story: 15.209 came first. To accomodate hobbyists who did not have a professional, calibrated, field strength meter, the FCC came up with 15.219. 15.219 is an alternative to 15.209. 15.209 does not have to be met if 15.219 is met. The complete history of the Part 15 AM rules from 1938 to the present time, which was given to me by the FCC's John Reed (who is now retired), is on my blog on this website.
In John Reed's account of the history of the Part 15 AM rules (which is on my part15.us blog), it states that FCC engineers had originally determined that the 15.219 rules should produce about the same field strength as 15.209. The FCC engineers, however, had not taken into account the ingenuity of experimenters, because said experimenters were able to get much higher field strengths with the 15.219 rules than the FCC intended. The ground lead restriction of 15.219(b) was added to reduce the field strength that could be produced.
I am mentioning 15.209 anf 15.219, but the section numbers actually changed from time-to-time over the years; but the actual rules changed only a little. It is possible to get more than a hundred times the field strength with 15.219 than with 15.209. The FCC has allowed this unintended result to stand, but they never removed the field strength restriction for other modes, such as FM and SW.