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Winter 2003 Issue |
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FCC Amateur enforcement |
FM On the Subject of Repeaters and Regs . . .
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How is repeater activity in your area? Busy? Kind of quiet? In the editorial in the October 2002 issue of CQ magazine Rich Moseson, W2VU, commented on how quiet the repeaters are around the New York metropolitan area, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Perhaps they have actually achieved the long-fabled status of having a repeater for every ham, and no one has anyone to talk to! OK, probably not, but I’ve noticed that same curious phenomenon when driving through some of this country’s big metro areas. Scanning the entire 2-meter and 70-cm bands, I found that there’s not a lot of talking going on. Lots of people think things used to be busier. I’m not so sure. I’ve always found 2-meter FM to be a “drive-time” band, with only sporadic activity during the middle of the day. There are more repeaters than there were in the old days, so activity is more spread out. Maybe it’s so spread out that any given repeater has a hard time achieving a “critical mass” of operation. W2VU suggests a simple solution: Get on the air! Keep the FM rig on and announce your presence. Answer others who ID, looking for a conversation. Talk! If you’re out of practice at this sort of thing, you might want to ease into it so as not to sprain anything. A few little “Nice weather we’re having. Oops I just got the call to lunch . . .” warm-ups will help get you in shape for something with a little more meat in it. This subject reminds me of some columns I wrote a few years ago about finding people to talk to on repeaters when you’re away from home. That’s a common complaint; nobody will talk to you on “foreign” repeaters, but there’s no problem scaring up a contact on your home machine. I put a theory to the test on a road trip: If you want to make contacts away from home, you have to make some noise. Mumbling “kn4aq listening” isn’t going to cut it. “This is KN4AQ mobile, traveling through Springfield on I-40, on the way from Raleigh to Chicago. Anybody want to talk for a few minutes?” That worked. That got me contacts in towns large and small almost every time, with some pretty good contacts, too. I’m not ham radio’s most prolific ragchewer, but I managed to time out some repeaters while going off on one tangent or another. Maybe I felt less inhibited because I knew my locals weren’t listening. A variation might work at home, too. The people are there. We just have to convince them that talking to us will be more interesting than listening to another 15 minutes of Rush or Dr. Laura, which leads directly to another problem that might keep some hams from getting into more conversations—“Boring Contact” anxiety. What if I get stuck talking to a real dullard? How many times can I back out, claiming that I have to “concentrate on my driving” when everybody knows I collect a speeding ticket every three weeks? There’s no easy way out of this. You just have to take the risk.
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of the Winter 2003 FM Column _________________ © Copyright 2003, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.
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