These comments were all VERY good advice Gary. I would add some other comments to theirs...
When people here say "good equipment" we mean it. Ask someone in the area who already has a repeater at a pay site what their lease says about it, many specify very specific gear required that many hams don't think about at all. (Isolators, lightning protection to match the site's system design, etc.) Your gear SHOULD look better installed, cleaner, and well kept compared to the other tenants. Remember, you are setting that site owner's expectations of how ALL hams do things, because they just know you as "ham radio". Sites can be "forever lost" to hams by one dork putting in some crappy pile of mobiles with cables running everywhere on a shelf in a cabinet that looks like something the dog threw up, or would throw up on and running crap coax up the tower, leaving it banging in the wind, and a ham-grade antenna that's causing passive intermod in all of its joints. As someone said, you tick off the wrong person at a commercial site, and you're doing stupid things, you've just become a liability and a risk they could lose their meal ticket -- you'll be gone so fast you'll be looking for your gear they left sitting outside on the sidewalk. Build to commercial standards. If a ham has a great site and you look at it and it has some limitation where you can't build the machine properly, thank them kindly and move on. If some ham says he can run RG-8X up to his roof and set you up with a great repeater site... run away. Or talk to them about what you'll REALLY be installing and see if they're still interested in playing. There *are* commercial sites that aren't hideously expensive, but they're often lesser "undesireable" sites for things like celluar and other "high dollar" customers. Look around for low towers with big buildings and few antennas. If the site covers where you want to cover, start the "hunt" to find the owner. They MIGHT be LOOKING for tenants after getting into a tower deal thinking the cell companies would come to them, and the cell companies put up a "flagpole tower" two blocks down at some other business. It takes a while to spot these things, and frankly... a lot of times they're empty because the owner is an A**. You just don't know. The comments about "community" are important. One of our sites is a long-standing relationship with a fire department. Besides that site, three other sites are commercial sites, all of which are "lower than commercial" cost, but not free. Sometimes it pays to just help a ham put up a tower in his backyard. (I don't know them, but friends have told me that this is exactly how and why a group in Kansas City known as the "BYRG" (BackYard Repeater Group) got their start. A bunch of guys put repeaters up at houses on hills, and got on with it. Finally, my personal comment I always make to anyone interested in repeaters... ALWAYS look around for a small group that ALREADY EXISTS and has sites. Frankly, I have never met a repeater group leadership person who has ever complained that they had TOO MANY *QUALIFIED* repeater maintenance and building helpers. Find out who REALLY works on the repeaters -- sometimes the clubs just aren't set up right to put you in touch with them, and start tagging along. Spend some time learning what their strengths and weaknesses are. Get "plugged into" the local repeater-building community. In most cities, other than the densely-populated coastal mega-metropolis areas, if you really counted up all the people who have "turned a wrench" on the local repeater systems, you'll find a LOT of overlap, a LOT of egos (ha... yeah, for some reason... it's only true...), and you can probably count them all on two hands... maybe adding a toe or two. A person willing to work, learn, and who doesn't annoy the CRAP out of the busy guys or gals working on the existing systems, will often become (over time) an invaluable asset to the organization(s) they work with, and will one day find themselves standing there going, "Hey wait... how did I get THIS job?", as they become the mentor. Soooooo many hams are "unteachable" not because they're dumb, or can't learn technical things -- it's because they have to "DO IT MY WAY". That's fine, but more gets done if even a FEW of these people can overcome whatever differences of opinion they have and work together building a system. It's also a lot of fun when it cranks up into high gear for a big project, which is often when new people either show their stuff, or don't run with the big dogs... just like anything else in life. Ever walk into a company, say you know everything and everyone's going to do it your way, and not have your co-workers not laugh at you, and/ or ask the boss why he hired you? The real repeater building community is pretty darn small. And is also pretty darn helpful. Other thoughts: If you can, stay out of the politics. If you run or maintain a repeater, you won't be able to -- but I'll guarantee it's the thing that will want you to sell all the radios and take up stamp collecting instead, time and time again. If it's not fun, don't do it. Speaking of that: It's REALLY easy for a PROPERLY installed repeater system to run anywhere from $1000 to $3000 if you're starting from scratch. See some of the articles on Repeater-Builder and think about performance... without lots of knowledge, making "mediocre" gear perform well isn't going to happen. You're going to have to buy commercial grade things to get commercial quality out of them, until you know what you're looking for and/or you ask around about how to scrimp and save only on the RIGHT components. Some things you just CAN'T scrimp on, and performance will suffer. Sometimes you don't care... but if you have little experience, get help from someone you KNOW operates a system that always "surprised you" at how well it worked. (This group is a GREAT place to do that... LISTEN to the people here, many of whom have built repeaters for decades.) Those "surprise" systems aren't all that different than the "mediocre" ones, until you learn some of the tricks. 99% (it would be 100% if Mike could get us all writing articles!) of the "hard stuff to learn" is HERE on the website. Read, read, read. Finally, since you're going to need a frequency anyway, and coordinators love people who do their OWN homework, program a rig with EVERY pair for your state/area according to the bandplan (not just things you know are on the air) and start scanning while driving around. You'll find new systems (with different coverage than your usual ones) and new owners of systems to talk to. Invaluable resources, again -- considering how small the community of builders and maintainers really is. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [EMAIL PROTECTED]
