Benjamin L. Naber wrote: > For those of you who are really doing all they can, this message is not > for you. It's for those that say they are so busy. So busy with what? > Really, ask yourself, what makes you sooo busy that you cannot get on > the air at home or in the car? Even for five damn minutes?
Benjamin -- I think a lot of us do as you do, and get on the air at each opportunity. But if I get on the air on every FM repeater I like to talk to people on (who are scattered across many), link up IRLP to popular places and say hello to other friends, get on the D-STAR system and do the same, fire up 2m SSB and see who's around in THAT group (they rarely get on repeaters, that gang), and also play a little on HF... That's hours a day. Realistically, I get on ONE of those things about once a day... call it five to six times a week. And look for a good conversation or friends to talk to. That means one person can only cover a very small amount of the time a repeater has available to it, each day... so to speak. Every repeater has 86400 seconds a day available to it to provide communications. I can maybe eat up a MAXIMUM on a really long QSO of two hours of KEY DOWN on my part... 7200 of those. It would take 12 people to keep the repeater on-air 24/7 at that rate, every single day. And if I were keying down for that long, I'd be considered a "repeater hog", I'm sure... but that's because the users all show up at generally the same times each day. See below for more on that. If we take out the overnight hours, you need 6 hams actively transmitting that much (which is too much) to have 12 hours of activity. You also need someone around to receive them and reply... and they could be the same people, but that's unlikely. So you probably need about 12 ACTIVE people on every repeater to make it a "busy" system. 12 hams, who talk a lot, every single day. I think the reality is... once you point out that most areas have at least 20 repeaters of some sort, with some kind of coverage in metro areas -- there's so many repeaters, we'll never adequately use the spectrum. Scanning helps. I pop over to other people's repeaters all the time. Luckily there's little in the way of "taboo" in doing this around here. If it's 2AM and I'm driving home and I hear ANY repeater pair (yes, I have ALL of them programmed into one rig) active, I'll either at least listen to the QSO or join in. How many people are bold enough to do that on unknown repeaters? I see it the same as "tuning around on HF"... if you're on-air, I'll talk to you that late at night.) Net's and set "activity times" are almost the only way to find the people interested in what you're interested in. And a lot of people turn off their rigs or go to other repeaters if the topic isn't something THEY are interested in. Interesting math for the number of seconds a repeater has "to give" every day, isn't it, when you break it down to real operators? It's amazing we ever find groups to associate with and stick with them on specific repeaters other than the fact that the real activity tends to "bunch up" around drive time. Most repeaters sit stone silent during the overnight hours, of course. So where is Repeater-Builder going to build an "always on" on-air presence? Does anyone even want to? Will we go crazy with end-user questions about repeaters? (Might be fun, might not...) Anyone willing to "park" somewhere? Nate WY0X
