How Repeater Coordination Works in Indiana

This site lists hundreds of Indiana repeaters, and many of the rows in the directory are marked “IRC.” That mark is about coordination, which is one of the least-explained things in amateur radio and one of the easiest to misread. Here is what it is, what it is not, what it means when you are reading a repeater list, and what to do about it if you are the trustee of a machine.

What coordination is

A repeater takes up a pair of frequencies — one it listens on, one it transmits on — for as long as it exists, across whatever area its antenna reaches. Two machines on the same pair, close enough to hear each other, spoil both. Nothing in the FCC's rules hands out those pairs. The amateur community sorts it out itself, through volunteer coordinators who keep the record of who is using what and check a new request against everything already on the air around it.

In Indiana that coordinator is the Indiana Repeater Council, Inc. (IRC), which has been coordinating Indiana repeaters since 1971. It is the recognized coordinator for the state: a charter member of the National Frequency Coordinators' Council, a member of the Mid America Coordinating Conference, and, as the council sets out on its own site, the only Indiana coordinator recognized by the NFCC, MACC, the ARRL, SERA, and the coordinators in the surrounding states. Recognition is the whole of it: a coordination has no force of its own, and its weight comes from other coordinators — and the FCC's rules — treating it as the record of who holds a pair.

Coordination is not an FCC license, and it is not permission to transmit. Your amateur license already lets you put up a repeater. The FCC does not assign repeater pairs and does not require you to be coordinated. What the rules do say is what happens when two repeaters interfere with each other: 47 CFR 97.205(c) makes both licensees equally responsible for resolving it — unless one station is coordinated and the other is not, in which case the uncoordinated one carries primary responsibility. The FCC's own definition of a frequency coordinator, in 97.3(a)(22), is a body that recommends channels and parameters to avoid interference. Recommends, not assigns.

So coordination is best read as the frequency-use agreement the amateur community administers for itself, which the FCC's rules point at rather than create. People conflate it with licensing constantly; they are different things, and only one of them is the government's.

What it means when you are reading a repeater list

The credit line under this site's repeater directory says, in one sentence, that a coordinated machine is not necessarily on the air and that a machine absent from the IRC's list is not necessarily off it. Both halves are worth unpacking, because they are the two ways a repeater list misleads people.

A coordination is a record of who holds a pair, not a report that anything is transmitting. Repeaters come down for a failed amplifier, a lost tower lease, a trustee who moved away or became a silent key. The coordination can outlive the machine by years — which is exactly the problem the council's standing request, below, is about.
Not every repeater on the air is coordinated. Some never applied. Some are new and still working through it. Some hold a coordination recorded under a call sign or a town you would not think to look under.

The practical version: a coordination list answers who has the frequency, and a directory answers what should be there. Neither one answers what will I hear tonight. For that, listen, ask a local club, or check into a net — the operators who maintain a machine are the ones who know whether it is up.

This site shows IRC-sourced rows with credit, and publishes them as open data, credited to the council. The coordinator's own searchable repeater directory is at flexweb.ircinc.org; go there for anything about coordination itself.

How to get a repeater coordinated

If you are putting up a new machine, or you have inherited one that was never coordinated, it is worth doing and it costs nothing: the IRC states that it neither charges for coordination nor requires membership to benefit from its services. An application is mostly about the physical facts that decide whether a pair will fit — where the machine is, how high and in what pattern it radiates, how much power reaches the antenna — and the council works the request against everything already coordinated nearby.

The process is the council's to define and it changes, so there is no point in a second-hand copy of it here. Start at their own pages:

IRC — Online Coordination — the section covering their online coordination system and its user guide.
IRC — Forms — the council's forms section.

Frequencies Wanted: releasing a coordination you are not using

The IRC has a standing request that is easy to miss, and the people it is aimed at are exactly the people who read a page like this one.

On some bands, in many parts of Indiana, there are few or no pairs left that a new repeater could take without causing harmful interference. Some of those pairs are held by machines that have been off the air a long while and are not coming back. Where that is the case, the council asks the trustee to release the coordination so the frequency can go to someone who will use it.

The council is explicit that this is not aimed at anyone who is working on a repeater. It recognizes that things happen that interrupt a machine's operation, and it says the best way to protect a coordination through a technical problem is simply to tell them what is going on — if they know, they will hold the coordination valid for a reasonable time to allow repair or replacement. In their words, they have “no desire to de-coordinate repeaters when the operator is making a good faith effort to restore operation.” What they are trying to find are the frequencies that genuinely will not be used in the reasonable future.

So the only thing being asked for is an honest answer about which case you are in. If your repeater is down and you are working on it, tell the IRC and the coordination stands. If it is down and, realistically, it is not coming back, say so and let the pair go to a machine that will get on the air. Read the request in full: Frequencies Wanted!

Who to contact

The IRC's officers are volunteers and they change: a chairman, a vice-chairman, a secretary/treasurer and the frequency coordinators. Who holds each role is on the council's own Your IRC page, which also carries their mailing address.

For a coordination question, a correction to their records, or a frequency you want to release, the council takes messages through the contact form on its site: IRC — Contact Us. If something is wrong on this site's repeater pages, that one is ours — send it in.

Indiana Repeaters — offsets, tones, modes, and the major linked systems.
Indiana Repeater Directory — the searchable, filterable list and map.
Frequencies & Band Plan — where repeater sub-bands sit in the wider band plan.

Coordination facts on this page come from the Indiana Repeater Council, Inc., Indiana's recognized frequency coordinator since 1971, and from the FCC's Part 97 rules. This site renders and republishes IRC coordination records with credit to the council.