There are several ways to deal with Regulatory Bureaucracies. One way is to rant and rave at them, which feels good but has no effect. Another is to fill in the forms and be patient. But my favorite way is to carefully feed the truth to the bureaucrats and watch the system tangle itself up in reality. Talking to the phone companies about my marine radio has been a source of this sort of entertainment lately.
First I called up AT&T with their latest bribe in my hand and told them I wanted to take them up on their offer to switch back, but I wanted to know if they had a service I needed. I described the AT&T radio telephone station I have seen at Point Reyes and asked them if they could connect me with someone who could help me get set up for marine calls. It took them a while, but they eventually did find someone who knew what I was talking about. Unfortunately I didn't know what I was talking about. Those installations I saw on Point Reyes turn out to be over-the-horizon systems for calling ships 50 miles or farther out to sea, and they have nothing to do with 'local' calls close to shore. Makes sense I guess for a long distance company. They suggested I call information and ask for the marine operator. Information had a lot of trouble finding anything, but they eventually connected me up with Pacific Bell's Marine Radio Office. In San Ramone, a landlocked city far from shore. It turns out that this office issues "Marine Calling Cards", handles billing for them, but no-one there knows how to use a radio. Unless someone in the office has a boat, (nobody did) they have no idea how their service is used. They could not even issue me a card until I had my call-sign from the FCC. (Please be patient, this may take up to 90 days).
"Well", says I, "can you connect me with someone who can answer
some questions about using a marine radio? Questions like: What channels
to use? Where are the transceivers located on the coast? How do you
initiate a call? Can you reverse charges"?
Pac Bell: "No, I'm sorry. Try asking your harbormaster".
Me: "Uh, what is a harbormaster"?
Pac Bell: "Were is your boat berthed"?
Me: "Usually on top of my VW bus".
Pac Bell: "Well, where do you usually launch it"?
Me: "I launch it from every beach along the coast, its a kayak".
Pac Bell: "You have a Marine Radio installed in your kayak"?!
Me: "No, I have it in my pocket".
Pac Bell: "They make them that small now"?!
Me: "Yes, and this may have an impact on how much business you get".
Pac Bell: "Well, is there a body of water near you where other boats are berthed"?
Me: "Yea, Bodega Bay".
Pac Bell: "Call information and ask them for the Bodega Bay Harbormaster".
Information: "We have no-one listed by that name in Bodega Bay".
Me: "Do you have a listing for the marine operator"?
Information: "No, but try dialing 0 and asking for the marine operator".
0-Operator: "Which marine operator"?
Me: "There is more than one"?
Operator: "Where is the boat that you want to call"?
Me: (Quick, make something up) "Uh, off Point Reyes".
Marine Operator: "May I help you"?
The marine operator was very helpful, in an offhanded way. She obviously had a job to do and educating me was not it. But she did mention that the way to initiate calls was to ask for the marine operator on the nearest channel. And then she told me that San Francisco was channels 26 84 and 87, while channel 28 was Fort Bragg. She neglected to mention that channel 25 is Bodega Bay, probably because that was who I was talking to.
I tried stopping at the Petaluma Dive Shop on my way to work, and asking them if they had any information about the use of marine radios. They sent me to Fred Fritz Electronics, a store who's motto is probably "Tell them your radio is on the Fritz". I had sent away to the Government Printing Office for a copy of the FCC rules for using a marine radio, but it takes 4 weeks for them to ship things. The helpful people at Fred Fritz' had a 4 page summary of these rules that they were willing to copy for me. Among other things, it had a list of all the marine channels and what their assigned uses are.
Included in this was a complete list of all the channels reserved for marine operators. I programmed all of them into the scanner on my radio and had it watch them for me. If I couldn't get anybody to tell me how to make phone calls on my radio, I would listen to everyone else making calls and learn by example. I had already used this trick to figure out which channel was traffic control in the San Francisco bay (14) and which channel was the coast guard (12). Driving home late one night, I heard a boat calling the Bodega marine operator on channel 25 (this is how I learned that there was a Bodega marine operator). He asked the operator to make the call and reverse the changes, so now I know that I can do that as well. This guy was stuck in a boat with a broken down engine, and was calling a friend to verify that they had arranged a tow for him. Unfortunately the tow could not be arranged for another day, and he would be stuck out in his boat for another 36 hours. I wish I could have heard the end of the story, because the swells at sea rose up to 15 feet the next day. I hope he was OK. But when the phone conversation ended, a strange thing happened: The people who received the call set their phone receiver down without hanging it up and forgot about it. So for the next 20 minutes, they sat in their living room talking about inconsequential things. Their phone picked it all up, ran it over land lines to the marine telephony transmitter, which broadcast it all up and down the coast and at least as far inland as the town of Freestone where I had pulled over in my car. How come the marine operator didn't cut them off? The probability that these two mistakes would happen (they forgot to hang up their receiver at the same time that the operator forgot to cut them off) while I was listening seems rather remote.
Then in Berkeley the next evening a similar series of 'mistakes' happened: I heard someone asking the San Francisco marine operator to try contacting a boat at sea. The operator went off to call the boat on channel 16, and the caller tucked the receiver under his chin and sat in his kitchen talking to his father-in-law about some new job opportunities in the area. I know they were in the kitchen because I could hear the sounds of water running and dishes clinking. At first I wondered who this third person was talking on marine frequencies, but realized that the phone was just picking up both people in the kitchen. They did not know that their conversation was being broadcast all over the bay, including homes in Berkeley like mine. I don't understand: Why did the marine operator connect this guy up to the transmitter before even finding the boat he was calling? The boat never responded and they were never able to complete the call.
One problem with a scanner on a radio is that the scanner often misses the first fraction of a second of a call starting on one of the channels. So in most cases you stumble into a conversation after missing the first word or two and have to interpolate the beginning of every sentence. Eventually the timing worked out right, and I heard a land-to-sea marine operator call from the very beginning. And the first thing that I heard was the sound of the operator's phone ringing! This means that the system is actually totally automated, and the transmitter turns on before the operator even picks up her phone! On outgoing calls, the only reason there is an operator is to switch to channel 16 and page the boat you are trying to call! In fact, the marine operator doesn't actually have to be connected to the transmitter in any way: She could be someone sitting on a rock with a hand-held radio like mine. Well, that would work for outgoing calls, not for in-going calls where the operator dials the number for you. This also means that the call I made several days earlier trying to pump information from the marine operator was also transmitted live. If I could have learned this in advance, I could have avoided broadcasting my ignorance up and down the Sonoma County coast.