On 2/23/07, Mike Morris WA6ILQ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well all the good (and not so good) sites are now owned by nationwide conglomerates that are run by accountants, with site managers that are more bill collector than radio tech.... (ever try to explain to an accountant why a 931mhz paging transmitter needs a circulator and a pass cavity?). Nobody has the desire or the ability do a freebie.
There's something interesting to be seen in your reply here Mike, if we look deeper. Shorty's system is basically a "conglomerate" itself. Perhaps the only way to "beat" the giants is to join them? Our club is pretty big too... four sites, more than that number of repeaters. Perhaps what we're REALLY lamenting here is that it's difficult (in every field) for individuals to do business with corporate giants. That's true everywhere, in everything. But a large club has resources to deal with the large site owners. The downside to running a large club is that it's a full-time job just keeping up with the paperwork. You need a small army of people to handle various things -- no individual can do a large club alone. The individual that owns a site and sees a chance to let someone with
a knack for electronics learn something while having fun with 25 year old radios that were slated for the junk pile is long gone.
Yeah but you can still learn those things with a "backyard" repeater on a small tower. People that really want to learn put things up... I've seen hams call up their buddies (through our repeater... ha...) and discuss when they'll be over to put up the repeater antenna on the other guy's tower, where they're going to run the hardline, etc. (I just laughed and chuckled to myself -- they were using our repeater to coordinate the build-out of another one... heh. Should I have been offended? Nahh..... GRIN...) And if you join one of the "conglomerate clubs" (new name?) and show even a modicum of technical prowess, the existing techs will happily teach... If you show up and claim you know everything there is to know already, that doesn't work... it's all about attitude. One of the reasons, of course, is that the stakes are higher. I bet Shorty can't (not won't... CAN'T) let just anyone wrench on his club's repeaters... he would run the risk of cutting off a large portion of the network if he let the wrong person without the right experience and attitude work on a backbone link, for example. But seriously -- he has "safety in numbers"... and I think he might have hit on something -- how to handle the changes in site ownership and prices... one way is to simply get bigger. Our club would NEVER be able to charge what a West Coast system or East Coast system can reasonably charge for membership... but our site costs are (a little) lower, and we run donation drives for specific projects... if we want something bad enough, people cough up a little extra cash and everyone enjoys it... whatever it is... and we save up our sheckles to do big projects that no one's interested in (like upgrade controllers -- only the techies care)... I'm not saying it's truth, just asking -- is one technique for dealing with bigger site owners to get bigger ourselves? Nate WY0X
