On Apr 6, 2010, at 6:36 PM, James Earl Wells wrote: > Be Kind.. Let Others have a Chance at the Ham Line. >
>From having been a repeater club President in the past, I can definitely state >with some clarity two things: a) Repeaters are a shared resource. You'll never make every user happy with how the other users utilize the system. b) All repeaters have at LEAST 8 hours a day of down-time unless they're part of large permanently-linked systems. In D-STAR there are no large linked systems unless the repeater has been linked to a Reflector, so any local user can disconnect from the Reflector and then connect anywhere else they like. Repeaters are busiest in the morning "drive-time" and evening from "drive-time" until about 9PM in most areas. If you have personal time available outside of those hours, you can do plenty of operating, with virtually no one around to "bother" you. (We have a couple of repeaters in this area that tend to have the night-owls, and operations continue on the VHF late-night machine typically until midnight, and a UHF machine gathers up all the late-night truck drivers and other workers until around 4-5 AM every day.) This all assumes you have local repeater operators that haven't blocked the ability of local users to control the links. Check with them for details. Hopefully they haven't done that. If the traffic truly is too high for a single repeater, consider that you can always offer to buy the repeater operators another repeater on another band... if they don't already have a complete D-STAR "stack" of VHF, UHF, and 1.2 GHz, and you're unsure of your technical skill to install a repeater system. I don't know of any repeater operators who would turn that offer down, unless you offered ONLY to buy the repeater -- the antennas, feedline, duplexer, and other assorted items often cost as much as, or more than the repeater itself. Or even offer to buy enough equipment to put up another repeater in the same band at another location... there's all sorts of options. Repeaters don't grow on trees. Someone spent thousands of dollars on all the gear to make the repeater work that you're wanting to use there... users often don't have enough money to single-handedly buy a repeater by themselves, but a bunch of users together who want a quieter D-STAR system, can always band together and put up a new system... And of course, there's always simplex... -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [email protected]
