As my summer visiting the San Francisco, CA and Bay Area draws to a close, I want to share with you some of the observations and surprises that I have made and learned while visiting California.
All repeaters are not closed
Years ago I was warned by my elmer Reuben, WB0BWL that the style of open repeater operation that the east coast and midwestern states has was something to be appreciative of. Reuben warned me several times that western states -
especially California - had a default of having
closed-access, or
members only amateur radio repeaters. If I were to ever visit California, I would need to
pay to play before even thinking of keying up a local repeater. Additionally, I was warned of
"all repeaters are closed, unless you get a personal invite" by former Californian and Minnesota transplant, Chris K9EQ.
This
members only mentality might have been true in the 1970's but it's far from the reality of 2015. Today, the members-only repeaters are completely a myth. Not only are almost all repeaters that are listed in both Repeater book and ARRL's published book open, the closed systems invite you to
try before you buy actively on the air, welcoming the infrequent newcomer. That said, closed systems make no illusions that they are open - it's explained clearly that it's a
members-only system - and that I am welcome to become a member. Just send some money, and don't be a LID on the air.
Perhaps it's a sign of changing times for the hobby and society. There are fewer people that find talking on two-way radio or making a voice phone call appealing anymore.
Jamming is not very common
I was also told that the activity level - especially jamming of repeaters - was off the hook in the area. I had enjoyed hours of listening to the iTunes internet stream of Los Angelos area repeaters just ten years ago. They were a non-stop soapbox of jamming, insults and verbal punching mixed with profanity. My summer observations are the opposite of that.
While there are more people here and more repeaters, jamming is really minimal in the Northern California / Bay Area. The closest thing to routine jamming happens on the Berkley 145.290 KB6LED repeater, by the
repeater owner. He keys up and makes childish-sounding "what? what?" noises to stir up
(poke at) a conversation on an otherwise dead system. I sometimes engage him in a short chat when I hear him try this
poking at operators when the system has been dead for several hours. He sometimes uses this as a
poke to get the one-hour rag-chewers with uninteresting conversations to get off the air.
I often listen to linked systems such as WIN and CARLA and never hear so much as heterodyne while two operators are rag chewing. Sure, the stogy Debbie-downers come on the repeater to tell the users that they are using some kind of scarce resource, but that happens all over the amateur bands.
For example, Todd recently
blogged how that "scarcity" of "keying up too many amplifiers" nonsense made its way to our short conversation on DMR a week or so back.
This happens on link systems in California, D-Star systems in Dayton, Ohio and HF all over the world. I have heard the common drum of users getting on to ask D-Star users to "wrap up the rag chew" in Dayton, Ohio during Hamvention two years ago. Regularly I hear HF nets where check-in after check-in has to say
"I don't want to hog the frequency, so back to net control," as if it's part of fitting into proper radio etiquette. So, the Debbie-downer syndrome of "don't use up all the airtime" stuff is not just a California thing. It's a
user-enforced belief that there exists
some sort of scarcity. And this nonsense happens everywhere in the hobby, not just in Northern California.
Downtown Intermod is non-existent
Most surprisingly, intermodulation issues in the major cities is non-existent. I have sampled San Fran, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose and Oakland. I have a very cheap set of Baofeng portable radios that I carry with me that suffer badly in the Minneapolis, MN downtown from intermodulation / receiver collapse.
That routine annoyance that plagues me at home in Minneapolis is not present here,
despite my expectations to the contrary.
Being kicked off a repeater happens off the air
The cultural norms of the people of California drive the major differences in amateur radio operational style. Northern California is presently in a boom-economy, with software technology companies providing the strongest economic growth to what is an over-crowded city, county and state. The constant fight for basic resources drives daily attitudes. Anyone seen as "not open" or "closed to the flow of what is good for the community" are shunned. Being
not open is seen as being
closed.
And closed is bad.
One example came up on the CARLA system a few months back. I overheard a routinely drunk, belligerent operator get the kindest
asking to leave or
being kicked off a repeater system I have ever heard. The owner of the system explained that the operators' on-air drinking was giving the link system a bad name, as well as the entire amateur radio community.
The LID agreed with the control operator, and after a few back and forths signed off the air without a fight.
I didn't recognize that the same operator a few days later was back - because he was sober - and engaged in a short chat while driving over to the local grocery store.
I later received a sarcastic and harsh-toned email from the repeater owner explaining how that ham was kicked off the system, and that I shouldn't talk to him. I got on the air to ask the repeater owner if I had committed an unforgivable sin, and
he was hesitant to discuss my operation or the other operator.
At no time did he even confirm that the other operator was kicked off the repeater system. Later, I received an email explaining that people banned from the system are only banned for a limited time, usually 30 days, and that banning is not discussed on the air.
The drive to appear "open" to everyone listening is so overwhelming that kicking someone off your repeater is done on the phone and via email instead of on the air. In Minnesota, we are just straightforward with people, being firm and clear on the air. And after receiving several emails on the topic,
I decided that I was not consistently recognizing this banned operators voice and found it easier to stop using the linking system myself.
But this "openness" (in Minnesota we call it "wish-washy-ness") is not a failing of amateur radio specifically. It extends to the cultural norms of the area. In an employee-led job market, were employees can jump from employer to employer (and often do, the average stay of a software developer is 18 months),
nobody ever wants to
seem overly critical,
harsh or
heavy-handed when performing job reviews or explaining cultural norms.
The mass-exit of employees could easily be blamed on a harshly worded misunderstanding by management. At my 90-day job review last week, I was given the full raise, with little explaining of my professional accomplishments (I had eight ready, my boss listened to two.) Additionally, if you make a mistake, there is a high tolerance for things not working out as expected, including downtime, as long as you learned something and can carry that knowledge forward during the next incident. In my professional experience in Minnesota, risk-assessments are done days in advance of any kind of deployment or upgrade and too-risky activities are stalled endlessly or cancelled all together.
Activity is about the same level, per capita, as Minnesota
California has many more people, and thus more amateur radio operators then Minnesota. I expected to have non-stop listening to rag chews and commuter traffic every day. Most traffic happens on machines that are south of San Francisco -- near San Jose, CA, and mostly on 440 MHz. I believe this is because the south bay has more of a suburban feel and more people in cars traveling up and down the peninsula. If I hear two or three separate conversations between 7:00pm and 9:00pm when driving through the South Bay, it's an amazing night. Most evenings 146, 220 and 440 MHz are completely dead. The weekly or monthly regularly scheduled emergency-service (ARES/RACES) net breaks the silence for about 30-45 minutes, and those are exceptionally boring to listen to.
Nobody in Downtown San Fran is on the air
Amateur radio activity in the heart of San Francisco is almost non-existent. I have had a number of people ask in person if I was carrying a ham radio when walking the city; but have only talked on-air with only two people that were within the city limits. The dense urban downtown office buildings block VHF and UHF communications so effectively that if you are in SOMA - the neighborhood South Of MArket where innovation and 30-something hipsters work - you might as well be inside a Faraday cage. The few repeaters that are located within downtown San Francisco provide excellent coverage within the downtown area, including CARLA's "System 2, N6MVT Repeater, San Francisco, beep."
Anyplace that 20-40 year olds with money work is a amateur radio dead zone of non-activity. The Mission neighborhood, where the Hipsters live, has excellent opportunity, although limited by the dense urbanness of housing and people, to work repeaters further south along the coast, as well as half-scale East Bay repeaters, such as Oakland.
Once you walk south of 10th street and Market, you can start to work Pacifica and Pacific Coast systems, including CARLA's "WB6JKV Repeater, System 32, Pacific Coast, beep." After I leave my office on Howard and 8th street and walk two blocks south, I have my pick of three good, five marginal CARLA repeaters, five DMR repeaters and a scattering of ten independent systems across the bay. The independent systems have virtually no traffic, and appear to serve the same purpose as backyard-hobby repeaters in Minnesota do (an ego boost to the repeater owner, and not much else.) The linked nature of CARLA and others provides more opportunity to have a happenstance meeting or conversation on the air, just as Todd has blogged about before. Stand-alone systems are a complete waste of energy even tossing out a call on.
