This is borrowed from a list of discussion of repeater owners. It’s from Jeff Otterson, n1kdo, and the title is “The REAL Reason Repeaters Are Dead!”
Feel free to comment, but keep it civilized.
Ray, KB0STN
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Well, this touched a nerve for me.
[Someone] said “the number of people that know how to work on repeater equipment I think is going down.” Well, yes, that is because they are becoming silent keys, and getting replaced by baofeng and anytone toting appliance operators. I doubt many of these hams own a DVM, much less the sophisticated test equipment required to set up and maintain repeaters. God forbid you ask them to solder something.
I believe that the covid pandemic did more damage to repeater operations than any of the “digital balkanization”. People stopped driving, and if most of their repeater operation was done during commute time, that all went away. Despite all the “return to office” efforts by employers, people still are not commuting, or are commuting odd hours. I maintain or help to maintain several high-profile repeater systems in Metro Atlanta, FM and DMR, 144 and 440 — there is very little traffic compared to 5 years ago. I listen to a dozen or more repeaters, and besides those on a scanner, there is very little traffic except for scheduled club nets. Nobody’s driving, and those who are are not talking.
As far as the “balkanization” goes, we’ve got D-Star and Fusion for hams, “pros” get DMR and APCO and Tetra and NXDN, all are using proprietary AMBE/AMBE + codecs, they are all largely a pain in the ass to setup and use, and have no cross-system compatibility. FM remains the only “common” mode. The digital balkanization was bad for digital voice users, not really of note to FM users.
When I got licensed, making a telephone call over autopatch was a really cool thing to do, people were impressed. Now everybody has a phone in their pocket, nobody is interested in autopatch any more, and that used to be a good reason to join a repeater group. Without a group of users willing to chip in, running repeater systems is an expensive proposition. Plenty of people bitch when the machine/s goes down, very few offer to help repair or pitch in cash to keep it running. I am getting too old and grumpy to love humping a 40 pound service monitor and another 20 pounds of tools to mountain tops or building roofs for a bunch of kerchunking lid appliance operators.
As far as the comments about repeater controller companies “going out of business,” that is a story for another day.
If you want to fight back against “dead repeaters” — PICK UP THE MIKE and START TALKING! Put your radio on scan and listen for traffic on more than just your favorite repeaters.
Merry New Year,
Jeff n1kdo
Author: Chris - N0YH
VE Team Lead - Facebook Manager - Webmaster - Club Vice-President
