Fun & Games: Repeater Coordination Edition

[NQ6U]

There's been some weird shit Happening with the local repeater scene here, too. Some outfit up in Orange County decided to annoint themselves repeater coordinators without consulting anyone else and started issuing pairs that were already in use. Not that it really matters all that much--the repeaters here are dead air 90% of the time.

[suddenseer]

Wow, really? This seems like a silly thing to have a turf battle over. 6 meters? We have a number of repeaters here, and there's never anyone on them, even when the cycle is up.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. We had the big battle over "closed" repeaters on 440 here in Northern California for years, but that pretty much got wiped out by PAVEPAWS. I'm sure there's some other "controversy" brewing on vhf that I don't know about, because I stopped paying attention LONG ago.

I dropped out of the vhf/uhf game about 10 years ago. I had an Icom 1.2 rig which I used to talk to my friend Larry in Fremont, CA using a linked system. We talked every day for about a week. The guy that set up the system told us NOT to use the system because "it was lighting up too many light bulbs". There was no inappropriate language or anything, the owner just wanted to have his system there and have no one use it. That was it for me. I got rid of all the 1.2 stuff because what good was it if I couldn't use the only decent system in NorCal?

I still use 2 meters occasionally to talk to Larry, but we usually use HF. The only reason I use VHF at all is that it is on my 746Pro.

The only repeaters I play on these days are the 10M ones when the band is up. I don't have a problem with a closed system, if it was coordinated that way. I have a beef when a club, or whatever decides to close it after the fact. Every machine i used on 2m I became a dues paying member of the club that ran it. When my county went 800 mhz trunk system, I hit the motherlode of cavities low/high VHF, and several repeaters. I ended up selling most of it at hamvention at my old club's table.