Activity draws activity on the MARA .800

I threw out my sign on the MARA 444.800+ (114.8 PL) last night after I came home from work, expecting the usual response of silence. The .800 has always impressed me, ever since I got my licence, and I keep coming back to it.
Back then, I used a monoband UHF HT with an exterior antenna as a base station and attached the HT to a mobile whip on my car to serve as an improvised mobile rig. This is, of course, "doing it wrong" in the eyes of many. Still, I was able to make this limited arrangement work well enough for my purposes. I could get into the 444.100 ("dot one"), the Gopher .425, the HandiHam .650, and several fairly dead repeaters. But it was the .800 that I could always reach with a good signal no matter where I drove in town, and it was the .800 that served as the benchmark for my experiments with various antennae. Aside from the minor "RF whisker" issue, the repeater has been remarkably reliable for as long as I've been on the air. 

And so it was the UHF .800 machine that I dialled in as I sat down last night. Though it's a reliable repeater with great coverage, it's also very "under-utilised". It's the machine that I spend the most time monitoring these days, and I seem to be only one throwing out their sign on it. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear K0LAV (Paul) come back to my sign. 

Paul always has some interesting project in the works, and I asked him a few questions about his current 2M/1.25M/SuperLink effort. He's always very open about these projects - what he hopes to achieve and what the obstacles are - and it's pretty interesting stuff. Best of all, he can "dumb it down" to my level without being condescending, so it's enjoyable to peek behind the curtain and see how these complex systems work. He explained that the UHF repeater in the tri-machine link equation was really more like an auxiliary link for the SuperLink, which is comprised of standalone VHF repeaters linked by a parallel system of UHF repeaters. He told me that the co-ordination for his 2M pair had been finalised, and that the VHF repeater was in operation at his home near White Bear Lake. While I'm not sure what it's permanent location will be, having remote receive sites on water towers in Columbia Heights and White Bear Lake should allow metro-wide access to the SuperLink and the 1.25M repeater. 

Since he's also involved in (or aware of) a lot of what goes in the FM repeater "scene", I asked Paul about the updated listing for the 443.450+ machine in St. Cloud, and if the coverage claims were realistic. While he didn't actually know what that situation was, K9EQ (Chris) joined in with the information. Chris was involved in the upgrade to a superior tower and confirmed that the coverage claimed was realistic. However, he added that the repeater was exclusively for D-Star operation.

Activity draws activity. The chat between K0LAV and myself had attracted someone else, and turned an "under-utilised" repeater into the host of a roundtable discussion that lasted for about two hours and further brought in WW8A (Wayne) and N0TGF (Norm). Later on, Paul observed that this roundtable was the most activity that the repeater had seen since it provided communications for a marathon earlier in the year. 

Ironically, one of the topics in the wide-ranging conversation was the disturbing lack of activity on the FM repeaters. Both Paul and Chris shared anecdotes about drives out of the State in which they experienced no response to thrown signs and a lack of any activity whatsoever on both linked and standalone repeaters. Paul actually had better luck on 2M FM simplex in some areas, and Chris encountered a repeater owner stunned to find someone actually using their machine. 

Paul added that one of things that he had tried in response to this was introduce linking. I was unaware that the 146.850 was linked (through AllStar) to a 2M machine near Mille Lacs Lake. The idea was that linking hams in remote, low-activity areas to hams in more populous areas could increase activity in both areas. Chris was of the opinion that people put up repeaters without considering a target audience (kind of like market research), and that repeaters need a mission statement to justify their existence. 

I've long thought that there are simply too many repeaters to support the limited number of operators willing to actually get on the air. We have at least a dozen wide-coverage 2M repeaters in the metro. Outside of nets (which are showing declining participation), there's little activity on most. Few have the "core group" (or "critical mass", as Chris put it) to generate enough activity to draw others out of silence. Even worse, it seems as if any repeater can only increase its activity by 'stealing' activity from another repeater. Paul noted the case of the Brainerd Lakes area, which has four VHF repeaters for a tiny population of users. The result is that operators miss each other by calling on the "wrong" repeater. And I think the more that operators throw out their signs without a response, the more discouraged they get about doing that again. It's a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. After a while, it becomes "normal" to ignore thrown signs and people that do respond are kind of viewed as "different" -- which is really bad in this hobby. 

We are fortunate to have so many powerful, well-sited, and well-maintained VHF repeaters in the metro, but it's also an immense duplication of effort and resources. I'm not a big personal fan of nets, as they are contrived activity that lacks the flow of conversation. But they are also 'safe' venues for anyone to participate, and a whole lot of repeaters seem to exist only for the purpose of hosting a weekly net. The same operators that feel comfortable in that structure simply do not feel comfortable striking up conversations with strangers, or with acquaintances outside of their small clique. And that "core group" never materialises to create activity that would draw others in. 

Nobody is in the position to "cull the herd" and reduce the number of VHF repeaters down to a sustainable number. The solution, in my mind, is to draw more people back on the air by introducing compelling 'content' -- a core group or critical mass of operators able to carry on actual conversations without intimidation, alienation, and enforced boundaries. Yes, you may be exposed to views that you don't completely agree with, but that's not a terrible tragedy. Maybe that's what at the social root of this slow evaporation of activity. There's simply less that we all agree on, and we're increasingly willing to isolate ourselves into artificially-maintained social environments to avoid contact with those who think differently from us. Our adult skills of respectfully responding to conflicting opinions are becoming vestigial. 

Certainly, four people were able to carry on a wide-ranging conversation last night without recriminations or enforced conformity of opinion. It would take considerable time to draw those that have abandoned FM repeaters back on the air, but it's worth doing. Without that core group and an open atmosphere, linking by itself won't increase activity. 

Make a point of coming back to someone's thrown sign at least once every time that you get on the air. Be willing to listen to them. The range of conversational topics is vast: home projects, car repairs, travel plans or past trips, holiday shopping, TV shows, outdoor activities, career goals, music, books, etc. You don't have to limit yourself to ham radio topics, and you might learn something. Grab on to threads of agreement and build on that until you hit "pay dirt". Either way, the odds are that your conversation will draw someone else in and expand those topics into something that's more your style. And, if you don't have anything to talk about besides griping about the weather or current events, maybe the problem is that your life is intensely boring, rather than other people being "different". There are ways to fix that.

Also, throw out your own sign on a "dead" or different repeater. What have you got to lose? If you generate a little activity, others might feel less conspicuous and uncomfortable when they come back to a thrown sign. Set an example, and use your status to a positive end. Move around to other machines and keep an open mind.

The long-term solution is not a technical one, solved by putting up more repeaters with a particular digital scheme or operating on a certain band. "If you build it, they will come", is not a viable long-term mindset for the hobby's future. As Chris noted, the better approach is to create a community, and then provide them with a reliable and constructive venue. 

There were a lot of other interesting subjects in that conversation last night, but I'll let you digest the "low activity" issue before addressing the other threads we covered.