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I have been told by someone that my repeater is not allowed to have a slash r on the end of transmission because that is an identifier for the Russian Federation.

Almost every repeater locally uses that, for example KDØWHB/R.

Am I allowed to use the /R identifier at the end of my repeaters call-sign?

Edit: I found this site, and it claims that R is not allowed for repeater usage

http://w3beinformed.org/id45.html

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In the USA (based on your callsign) I know the FCC specifies /KT, /AG, /AA and /AE because they are in the US callsign group. According to the FCC (97.119):

"If an indicator is self-assigned, it must be included before, after, or both before and after, the call sign. No self-assigned indicator may conflict with any other indicator specified by the FCC Rules or with any prefix assigned to another country."

So it sounds like technically you could argue that you should never sign /R (for repeater), or /M (for mobile - since M belongs to the UK) or /MM (for maritime mobile - since MM corresponds to Scotland).

The consensus here: http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php?topic=32949.0 is that the FCC rule is badly written. If you're really concerned, you could sign /R. or /RPT, since that is not a prefix assigned to another country.

Based on the ITU article 19, I think you could also make the argument that R is not a prefix - that R0-R9 are prefixes. (http://life.itu.ch/radioclub/rr/art19.htm 19.68). After all, a foreign station in the US can't just transmit VE1RAC/W, they need to transmit VE1RAC/W7.

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    $\begingroup$ I think the last point is the most valuable point of your answer. /R is not sufficient to indicate a Russian signal, there must be some other number associated with it. $\endgroup$
    – PearsonArtPhoto
    Apr 14, 2015 at 11:51
  • $\begingroup$ I'm not sure how much I like this answer. The referenced document explicitly states following:19.50.1 For call sign series beginning with B, F, G, I, K, M, N, R, W and 2, only the first character is required for nationality identification. In the cases of half series (i.e. when the first two characters are allocated to more than one Member State), the first three characters are required for nationality identification. (WRC-03). Therefore, no extra character is needed for country identification. This is in agreement with Russian use of callsings, such as for example RCV, RCJG, RKO81 etc. $\endgroup$
    – AndrejaKo
    Apr 19, 2015 at 19:20
  • $\begingroup$ Furthermore, to me this seems like an issue with national regulations and not international. I could be wrong, but I really don't see when would AA1BBB/R be used as identification that station if operating from RF. Correct form of operation for say US station in Russia would be say RA/KD0WHB, with country of operation prefix in front, so this shouldn't be an issue of having station look like as if it's operating from Russia. $\endgroup$
    – AndrejaKo
    Apr 19, 2015 at 19:23
  • $\begingroup$ I do remember adding a self-assigned "-1" to my callsign when it was the PBBS system at the National Guard, to differentiate it from when it was me using my callsign. And it was required to be appended at the end. The PBBS was AL7**-1 and I was AL7** as I logged into it on 145.010 - we used it for years like that, with a beacon to announce its presence. $\endgroup$
    – SDsolar
    Sep 14, 2017 at 3:56

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