Radio jamming in Lebanon

It will be almost impossible for the FCC to track this culprit as they can do it only when its occurring I think. It may even be one of the people who has an official radio trying to be helpful. My guess is it is not a HAM, as they understand the seriousness of this issue. It may be a youth who is dabbling in amateur radio stuff and thinks it cute. At this point that has changed to deadly serious.

This is just another example of the deterioration of our society.

I remember hearing Jason Cole give an interview saying this has been going on since the mid 90s...so the odds of it being a young person like a teenager is not likely.

Although now that somebody has been killed because of slowing response time due to their interference by several minutes, this might give them a moments pause in continuing to do this.

Probably and Occupy Augusta liberal that doesn't like the police.

But this has nothing to do with the police and everything to do with the Rescue Services Division. (ambulance)

this has been going on since the mid 90s...so the odds of it being a young person like a teenager is not likely.

And very unlikely it is the same person or people.

I'd suggest a "home on jam" weapon, except the guy might live in an apartment house.

;^)

Here is the news report from WGME on this new story.

Man involved in crash affected by 'jamming' dies

Lebanon rescue personnel met last week with FCC officials to discuss the case. Assistant Rescue Chief Jason Cole said the meeting was productive, but he couldn’t release any details for fear of jeopardizing the investigation.
The town of Lebanon and few surrounding towns have been dealing with radio jamming off and on for several years.
The penalty for radio jamming is a fine of up to $112,500 or, in some cases, prison.

PPH

Well I do have a General Class Amateur Radio license and I am involved with several repeaters down in Southern Maine. Given that one repeater in Waterboro has been plagued by a jammer for two years we believe that the repeater jammer is also the same person who is causing the interference with public safety frequencies. Because of things that have happened at the repeater site this jammer has demonstrated knowledge that is easily acquired, but well understood by HAM Radio Operators. It is the opinion of many involved that we are dealing with a HAM Radio Operator. I can also say that there are many ways to catch such a person and the HAM Radio community is working pretty hard to find this person too. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

I am also a HAM. I am told that nut jobs like this want one thing badly--publicity and it sounds like this one may get his wish.

Dennis, in this case we in the HAM community believe that this individual is acting based on a grudge he has with people in both the HAM and Public Safety communities. Interestingly enough there was an item left at the repeater site involved that was turned over to the York County Sheriff's department two years ago and nothing has been done with it to see if there are any fingerprints on it. I find that interesting. Especially given that the repeater owner is a police officer in the effected area and the evidence was processed properly.

What exactly is your point.

thanks

charlie

Could it be a miss-configured repeater? Or unintentional interference?

What type of jamming is it? Someone talking over the police which would indicate someone doing it on purpose or is it just noise/etc? A miss-configured repeater could easily be repeating a radio transmission with the output being garbage. This could be un-intentional.

Someone is not talking over the repeater, that are preventing access to the repeater which means this individual is jamming on the input frequency. That effectively makes the repeater useless. The closer you are to the repeater the easier it is to jam the input frequencies with lower power. In the case of the local repeater I mentioned this jammer did something at the tower site that jammed the repeater on the input frequency at specific times of day with no effort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_repeater

Check out the above link for information about how amateur radio repeaters work. These basics apply up and down the spectrum so public safety frequencies and communications will work the same way just using different frequency bands. For obvious reasons I am not going to get into the specifics of public safety frequencies.

So the bottom line here is that I strongly feel there is evidence available that could help the authorities put an end to this madness and it is being ignored.

Or someone has a compatible radio which since the advent of radios going digital they are realtively inexpensive and easy to procure.
A comparision where at one time a good brand name portable radio let's say GE or Motorola would set you back $800 to 1000 plus the last radios I was involved with buying for work were $360 which included extra battery!
Hi I am a volunteer fire fighter/part time cop etc. etc. and I want to purchase my own radio , ,easy enough!

So its possible a repeater could be mis-configured or have an intermittent hardware failure. I've experienced wifi hardware going bad and acting weird, the same can happen to other radio equipment. I'm just saying its possible for the legit repeater to have failures or someone running their own repeater is failing or not configured correctly. Not necessarily deliberate or criminal.

Both my youngest son and I have our general tickets, passing the test in 2008. We were in a ham club in NH at the time, with quite a few oldtimers in the club who had been in it for many decades. It always fascinated us to listen to these oldsters talk about the history of Ham radio.....that they had lived.

I always believed that all ham operators were very serious about their hobby and would never do anything remotely like this. But our nation is changing.

The rules have changed now so that it is much easier to get into Ham radio than it ever was before. The code test is not required now to get a Tech license. I think this has been both a good and bad thing. It has allowed many to get into ham radio that never would have before. The good side to this is that many of these are emergency workers in one form or another. The downside is that this has also allowed more than few folks to get into ham radio who are not as serious as operators were before. Our club received over a dozen new members at one time. Some of them saw the VHF radios that they used, to be sort of "glorified CB radios" and the main reason to join the club was to socialize, which they seemed to enjoy more than the radio.

It would not be very hard to interrupt the operations of a two meter repeater! It is much harder to imagine a Ham doing so.....but stranger things have happened for sure. The system of repeaters has a terrible weakness and that is that it needs the repeaters in order to communicate for much more than 10 miles or so, depending upon area terrain and weather conditions. The ARES system is set up to use these repeaters linked together, in an emergency. But if the power grid should go down, the repeaters will be out of business shortly unless someone is there to power up a generator and keep any eye on things.

That is one of the biggest reasons that we like HF so well. The range then is basically worldwide, depending upon weather conditions and atmospheric conditions, much easier to keep running in an emergency. We have our radios with battery backup and they can run on any 12V DC source which is alwasy available whenever a motor vehicle is around! These HF radios are tops in any emergency, and are what Ham radio always was about!

WC

Matt888.

It is possible to misconfigure a repeater, but hardly worth the time and effort. Many repeater sites are fairly well protected or isolated, but again it is easy to jam a repeater on its input frequency with a relatively low power device placed in the right spot. I really cannot elaborate more than that. Radio Communications companies don't just allow anyone to purchase a radio with matched frequency pairs for public safety purposes. You can buy used commercial radios, but it is very difficult for the average person to acquire the software and hardware needed to program said radios. HAMs and commercial radio technicians are far more likely to have access to such materials.

Many Amateur radios can receive (hear) output frequencies outside of the HAM band. Basically 2 meter radios can be used like police scanners. It is very easy and not illegal to modify these radios to transmit outside of the HAM bands. I have one radio that is modified and one that is not. The catch to making the modification is that you cannot transmit on frequencies that you are not authorized to transmit on. As an example if I am working communications at a large event and the Maine National Guard loans us their equipment so we can transmit on their frequencies, than I can program my operational radio for use on those frequencies. Of course once the event is over, all bets are off and I can no longer transmit on those frequencies.

Is it possible that someone has an old radio and has mistakenly put the same frequency crystal in both recieving and transmitting ? That would take another repeater; would it not? Otherwise it has to be personally operated and jamming deliberately. Right?

Are all transmissions being jammed or just during a certain time of day? Is direction finding equipment not available for this frequency?

Or maybe the real repeater is messing up? Malfunctioning hardware or software.

None of the above scenarios are possible. This is intentional jamming and it is targeted at specific individuals and or transmissions. If we were dealing with repeater problems, bad crystals or mistakes due to an old radio that were misprogrammed, we would see this happening more often. What we are experiencing here is a person who is into causing problems and they have plenty of time to do it. I have experienced the work of this person and I cannot wait to see if they are caught. This last event and the resulting death may slow them down a bit, but then again if the FCC and the York County Sheriff ever showed interest in the evidence it has been sitting on for two years this might be solved very quickly.