Subject: Help K3TKJ Keep QTH.NET Going I saw the following on another qth.net reflector:
Today has not been a good day for me. I am totally bummed out. Other than the technical things with the servers, much of my time is spent trying to find creative ways to finance what we do and not make it commercial. I usually remind our users in the late Fall of donations and during this time of the year I have 2 "Platinum" sponsors that I contact. These 2 account for about a third of our yearly expenses. Today I made the calls and both are not able to help us any longer, I can understand this. The economy is flat and who knows when it will get rolling again. We are in trouble.... This means we are $10K short for the year at the start, but it gets worse. I can't put any more money into this than I already do, to do so would not be fair to my family. The only place I see this being made up is from the users with a great deal of effort on our part. If every user gave us a dime we could operate for 18 months or so, If every user sent us $1.00 we could operate for the next 20 years. What actually happens is about 600 users/clubs donate an average of $10 each and we never hear from the rest. I'm not ungrateful for the donations don't get me wrong but it is the same users year after year and that will cease too, I'm afraid. With no help we will be in deep dodo by Fall. I don't want to sound like a TV evangelist always begging but I guess maybe that's what it takes. I need you to be aware of the financial needs of the system and to remind your users as frequent as you see fit that we depend on them to do their part so that you and I can do our part. Please don't go off yelling the sky is falling and/or posting this mail to your lists, but sometime in the near future state our case and ask for user help. The majority of the expenses monthly are for Internet access, this access is only affordable in 2-3 year contracts. We have one now that is $12K a year for 3 years. That T1 is at about 105% and is getting so slow it is unusable at times. We have another broadband circuit due to be installed Friday morning, this one will be $6K a year for 3 years. This will solve the bandwidth congestion but adding the $600 a month to the $833 a month we won't be getting from above and suddenly we are $18K in the red this year. To give you an idea of how much bandwidth it takes to run all this, imagine the next time you download a program or something from the net and the little box says your speed was 194KB (a 56K modem would be about 5K) Our output is 194KB 24/7 it drops off the peg for just a few hours after the US goes to bed...Our incoming is a paltry 50KB 24/7.... If you have any other ideas how to support us I am listening. As always thanks for your help, Al To help with a donation, go to; http://www.qsl.net/donations.html Send this message to any qth.net reflectors you subscribe to for posting if you haven't seen it posted there yet.
