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Summer 2004 Issue |
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FM By Gary Pearce,KN4AQ Looking Good on Paper |
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“Guilty, your Honor,” I said softly, my head hanging low. The charge? Hogging a 2-meter repeater frequency coordination for a repeater that had been off the air for well over a year. My lawyer reminds me that four years is well over a year. The venue? My imagination. “But there were extenuating circumstances!” I pleaded. “There always are,” sighed the weary judge. I’m also guilty of not writing about my indiscretion until the repeater was safely back on the air and the coordination was updated. What kind of fool do you think I am? In case you haven’t already figured it out, the subject of this column is “paper repeaters.” Maybe you use a different term for them—repeaters that are coordinated and show up in the repeater directories, and that are not on the air and the prospects for getting on the air are dim in all but the mind of their owners. Hope springs eternal. If you are the owner of one of these maladroit machines, you can follow my example, or get serious about getting it on the air. (I would strongly recommend the latter.) If you are a befuddled would-be user of a repeater that exists only on the pages of your repeater directory and in the filing cabinet of your local frequency coordinator (ergo a “paper repeater”), maybe I can explain what’s going on. After all, I’m a reformed sinner myself.
The reasons for maintaining a paper repeater
tend to be found in a few general categories. Among them are the
following: You have the machines that were coordinated but never made it
on the air, or the machines that broke or got zapped by lightning and
collected dust on the bench waiting for repair or replacement. Tower sites
are lost, and new ones are difficult to find. Behind each tale of woe is
the repeater owner or club repeater tech who has the best intentions of
getting the repeater back up, but he is busy and there’s always something
just a little more important to do. Weeks, months, years . . . the time
just slips away. What’s the problem? There are a couple of them.
First, it’s the users and their repeater
directories. I have a foot in that camp. I use the heck out of my radios
when I’m traveling. When I’m in a new town, I use the ARRL (or SERA [SouthEastern
Repeater Association], or local website) repeater directory to see what
repeaters I can hit. It isn’t easy. General repeater directory usability
(or lack thereof) is bad enough. Regional groupings may mean something to
the locals, but travelers will be clueless. Repeaters listed for small
towns (population 340) or obscure mountaintops are no help either without
a lot of research. When a large percentage of the listed repeaters aren’t
even on the air, thumbing through the directory can be an even more
frustrating exercise. Click here to return to Summer 2004 highlights Click here to subscribe to VHF _________________ © Copyright 2004, 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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