Illegal satellite decoder cards cause serious interference to public safety organizations

Industry Canada is warning the Canadian public that using illegal satellite decoder cards, often referred to as AVR cards, can cause serious interference with communications systems of public safety organizations and those that continue to use the cards will receive appropriate penalties. Following several complaints from Canada’s Federal Search and Rescue (SAR) program and one Ontario local police department, the department served notice in DGRB-002-02 that it will prosecute offenders (RoW Update, June 18/02). The unwanted interference is caused when the AVR card is plugged into a satellite TV receiver, which then emits radio signals outside of normal frequencies. Search and rescue and law enforcement radio networks are affected by the "noise", which can be construed as an emergency distress signal. There is one confirmed case of an AVR card causing unwanted interference to public safety networks. The London Police Department reported to the department that one of its radio repeaters was receiving "noise", which was subsequently tracked to a home that had one of the illegal satellite decoder cards plugged into a Bell ExpressVu LP satellite receiver, explains Jim Theissen, a policy analyst with Industry Canada. While this is the only confirmed case of interference with police systems, there have been numerous cases of reported interference with search and rescue operations. First-generation emergency locator beacons operate in the 121.5 MHz band where much of the unwanted interference is occurring. "Search and rescue are reporting to us on a regular basis that they are seeing signals on the 121.5 MHz band," Theissen tells Report on Wireless. He’s reluctant to say for sure, however, whether illegal AVR cards are actually causing the interference. "We’ve had reports from search and rescue (teams) where they’ve noticed signals on that frequency in major cities, but our engineers haven’t (yet) proved conclusively that it’s being caused by AVR cards," he says, adding that the investigation is still ongoing. Industry Canada has been investigating the issue for a couple of months and it is still unsure when the analyses will be completed. "Part of it is understanding how the search and rescue satellite constellation functions and we’re still learning about that in conjunction with search and rescue officials," Theissen explains. Potential interference issues arising from the use of illegal satellite decoder cards is not limited to just law enforcement and search and rescue organizations. "It’s kind of like a lottery if they are going to interfere with a particular service that’s close by or not," Theissen says. "There’s been concern by Nav Canada that (these cards) could cause interference to general aviation communications because these (signal) spikes are in the general aviation frequencies as well as VHF frequencies used by two-way radio services." As a way to combat the interference issue, Canada’s SAR program has implemented a new emergency beacon system, which operates on a different band. Second-generation beacons operate in the 406 MHz band and are immune to this interference. This is a long-term strategy and may take until the end of the decade to be fully implemented. Users of the older beacons can use them until they break. Industry Canada would like to switch all users over to the new system by 2009. But department officials say the older beacons will be supported as long as some of them are operational, and the potential for major problems will remain for many years even as the 406 MHz beacons are phased in to improve the situation.

Illegal satellite decoder cards cause serious interference to public safety organizations

News | 06/24/2002 4:00 am EDT

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