We address the tachyonic slepton problem of anomaly mediated supersymmetry
breaking using abelian D-terms. We demonstrate that the most general extra U(1)
symmetry that does not disrupt gauge coupling unification has a large set of
possible charges that solves the problem. It is shown that previous studies in
this direction that added both an extra hypercharge D-term and another D-term
induced by B-L symmetry (or similar) can be mapped into a single D-term of the
general ancillary U(1)_a. The U(1)_a formalism enables identifying the sign of
squark mass corrections which leads to an upper bound of the entire
superpartner spectrum given knowledge of just one superpartner mass.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, [v2] reference added, [v3] Eq. (9) corrected,
results unaffected, [v4] version to be published in Phys. Rev. D, expanded
parameter space for figures to match tex