ORIGINAL: mrbigg
ORIGINAL: BarracudaHockey
Unfortunately MrBigg won't be paying the 10 grand per occurance fine so 20 or 30 bucks to do it right is cheap.
Why would I be paying the fine? I didn't say that I do it. You just assumed it. From what I've witnessed, there is no problems at all swapping crystals and I encourge everyone to try it and see for your self. Do it at home away from the field. Do some range tests. Use a gasser with a magneto ignition. Then check your frequencies with one of those frequency checkers. You'll see that the crystal you swapped out is not jumping in between channels like some people might have you believe.
The irresponsible attitudes displayed by some people just amazes me. There are several reasons to NOT do this, fine or no fine.
First, we SHARE the 72 mhz band with other users. If your transmitter bleeds over onto a shared frequency, there's a risk of interfering with them. A field frequency checker WILL NOT CATCH THIS. If we routinely start causing such interference, at some point, the FCC WILL do something about it. And when they have to choose between irresponsible people playing with toys who can't follow the rules, and business users, guess who will lose.
Second, interference is not the only problem. This winter I sent a second hand transmitter to Radio South that I picked up from someone else. The original owner had changed the crystal to a different frequency. I got a phone call from them explaining that due to the crystal swap the power output was only 50%. Tuning brought it back up to 100%. I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't want to be flying my planes with my radio at 50% power output.
Given these things, it's hard to understand why anyone would be irresponsible enough to advocate changing crystals without sending the transmitter in to be checked and tuned.