Repeater Owners are Servants, not Gods

This will come as a shock to some of those whose call signs are attached to Amateur Radio repeaters: You’re not special and the Amateur Radio community does not need you nor owe you anything. And, if your repeater is closed or demands a large “voluntary” membership fee, you are hurting, not helping, Amateur Radio.

Over the years, I have run into individuals who behave as if owning a repeater is a position of great power, which they exercise by deciding who can use the repeater and for what purposes in a manner that rewards friends and creates enemies. Sometimes they just aren’t friendly, and chase newcomers away. Some of those people never turn on their handie-talkies again.

This is bad news and should not be tolerated by the users (just go someplace else, kick the jerk out of your club, etc.) and damages ham radio. Almost all repeater owners — meaning individuals who control a repeater coordination and “own” a frequency — could disappear and nobody would care.

If you doubt me, tell your local repeater coordinator that you are turning off your repeater and see how long it takes for someone to grab your frequency pair. They may get more users than you have, put up a better system or both. There is, in many places, tremendous pent-up demand for repeater pairs.

In fact, if you repeater isn’t working as well as it might, perhaps it shouldn’t be on the air at all?

I will admit to not being perfect in this regard. My high-level repeater awaits a better antenna, better controller, and will someday (perhaps) move to a more favorable site on the hill. My low-level repeater needs to move to a new location that is a bit higher. I have a new (for me) repeater sitting in the garage ready for when the new site is chosen.

My third repeater is off-the-air and waiting for a duplexer to be tuned before going onto a temporary and then permanent repeater.

Each of these machines is intended to provide emergency communications for specific areas and will, eventually, be part of a linked system. Locally, we are having monthly repeater owner meetings to work on the details, which include rehabilitating an older repeater, adding a new controller to another and voting receivers to two others. And I’d like to fulltime link three or four low-level repeaters. If we can find a pair, there is another site that could use a repeater, too, and would improve talkie coverage in a population center.

Maybe the local repeater situation where you live could be improved, too? When all this work is completed, our county will — we hope — have handie-talkie coverage pretty much everywhere, which we currently lack. Given that talkies are the standard tool of the emergency communicator, improving HT coverage seems pretty important.

We also have a portable UHF repeater built and will soon have two preprogrammed backup repeaters that can quickly replace a failed piece of hardware.

None of this is perfect, but by working together we can create a better repeater system of connected and standalone repeaters than any of us could do individually. We are also creating a system to better serve the total ham community and provide improved emergency communications to the public.

We are also adopting a standard “code” of operation that makes the repeaters open to all and gives anything vaguely emergency or public service-related priority over all other uses, no pre-notification required. As one owner puts it, “If you’re looking for a lost dog, use our repeater to do it.”

I am not trying to suggest that we are better than anyone else, after all this mess we are trying to fix/improve took years to develop. And there are many, many great repeaters, repeater groups and individuals that we could certainly learn from.

Repeaters Come With Responsibilities  

As an individual repeater owner, I am a public trustee. Both for Amateur Radio, which uses the machine, and the community, which is supposed to benefit from its use.

Having a repeater is a public trust because not everyone can own a repeater and once a repeater is on a particular frequency no one else can use it within its coverage area. It is also true that the airwaves belong to everyone, not me, not you, and not even Amateur Radio generally.

We get to borrow the airwaves because of the services we provide to our country, as defined in Section 97.1 of the FCC’s rules.

As a repeater owner, I see it as my responsibility to:

• Provide a communications resource for the entire Amateur Radio community
• Optimize the repeater so that it covers the area it is supposed to as well as possible
• Make the repeater available to anyone who wants to use it, for any legal purpose
• Keep the repeater working — there are way too many barely-functioning repeaters on the air, taking up frequency space
• Promote use of the repeater
• Transition the repeater to a new owner when I am no longer interested enough or capable of maintaining it
• Understand that because I operate a repeater, someone else cannot, so this is a serious responsibility

Perhaps as a result of the more than 25 years when I was a ham and could not find a repeater pair, not that I am a repeater owner, it is my honor to serve the public and Amateur Radio community. If you are in the San Joaquin Valley, please use my repeaters. Or any of the others in our repeater group. They are all open to you.

EMCOMM Groups: If You Aren't Doing, You're Dying

If your local group doesn’t have stuff going on, you’re dying. It’s just that simple.

The great killer of volunteer organizations is not having anything for the volunteers to do. If they don’t have something to do, your volunteers will find something else to do — like a more interesting and involving volunteer organization to work with. Let that happen long and often enough and it’s game over for your group.

Get Newcomers Involved Right Away

Years ago at the Red Cross, we made a rule that a newcomer had to be invited to every middle-of-the-night disaster callout, usually to help people who had just suffered a fire.

That policy was developed after Elionora and I joined and didn’t get a run for more than nine months! We ended up, over five years, taking too many runs, but that is a common Red Cross experience.

The point here is that if your new members don’t get to participate in “the mission” of your group very quickly they will become bored and leave. Volunteers join to do something, so find something for them to do.

Likewise your longtime members need things to do. Warning: Leaders can be suckered into thinking they have a functioning EMCOMM group when they really don’t. If you have a bunch of members that seem satisfied sitting around pretending to be ready but not doing anything, that is exactly what they are: pretenders.

We all know clubs that pretend to be ready for emergencies and wrap themselves in the warm glow of supposed “community service.” Sadly, the demographic shift in Amateur Radio (“Now older, slower than 20 years ago!”) is making this a common reality, I fear.

There is also what I will call “The CERT Challenge” in a future post that is part of the reason CERT, RACES/ARES/ACS and other volunteer responder groups need to band together.

Speaking of which…

One of the reasons we recently started California Emergency Volunteers is to offer training and participation opportunities to members of all volunteer emergency groups.

We have hams and CERT members mostly, but look forward to expanding beyond that base.

We organize training on our own and help other groups organize theirs, provided outsiders are invited to attend this shared training. Likewise events, where we encourage participation from outside the usual sponsoring group. In this way, we hope to improve training, encourage mutual aid and keep volunteers active.

Don’t Just Read This — Do Something!

You may not be able to do what we do — or may be able to do more — but anything you do (think real quarterly training and exercises) will improve skills and help retain members. And, by all means, work with everyone who will work with you.

This really is a case of “do or die.” 

Our Busy Calendar

I have just finished the first version of an 2012 events calendar for hams in my county. There is still more to add, but we already have more than 300 opportunities for hams to participate. Now, with four clubs, most of these are weekly nets and monthly meetings, but it also includes HamCrams, trainings, exercises and public service events.

Your group should have at least 72 events on its calendar. Here’s how I figure that: 52 weekly nets + 12 monthly meetings + 4 quarterly drills/exercises + Field Day + your state QSO Party + 2 public service events = 72. If you share events with other groups, your number could be significantly larger.

Get Up and Do Something

I am not trying to suggest that any group is better than any other, although I do believe there are some minimum standards that must be met if we are to truthfully offer EMCOMM to our communities. What I hope top do is merely encourage more groups to do more things and involve more people.

Every so often I will get an email from someone lamenting the state of their local EMCOMM group, usually a problem of well-established but atrophied leadership.

This is a simple problem to solve: Do something. Anything. Doesn’t have to be EMCOMM. Anything that gets your people together — monthly dinners, breakfasts, hidden transmitter hunts, whatever — can become the basis for revitalizing your group.

The most important thing you can do is organize HamCrams and create a new generation of emergency communicators in your community. If you want to talk about this, drop me an email. I plan to write a post about this but it may be longer than you care to wait.

In the meantime: Do something, OK?

"World of Amateur Radio" 1978 ARRL Film (Really Cool!)

Dick Van Dyke, Roy Neal K6DUE, Barry Goldwater K7UGA, King Hussein JY1, Arthur Godfrey K4LIB and many others extol the virtues of amateur radio in this vintage film from 1978.

On YouTube Tim Verthein KC0JEZ writes:

I converted this old and somewhat damaged 16mm film to video tape many many years ago when the technology to do that was rather archaic. I have now converted those old video reels to digital movies. 

I, Repeater Owner (Part 1)

N5FDL/R in Ripon, borrowed Vertex repeater and Telewave six-cavity duplexerI never expected, in my entire life, to have my call sign on an Amateur Radio repeater, much less two of them. And on 2-meters, too.

Yet, if I key up on 147.015 + PL 82.5, I’ll get a response in the voice of my oldest friend, Ben Harold, KG4BYN, announcing “N5FDL Repeater, Tracy!” Key up on 147.210 and I hear my callsign sent in Morse code that is actually too fast for me to copy (if I didn’t already know it was N5FDL/R being sent).

Like most everyone else, I believed the airwaves were impossibly crowded, that two meters, especially, is “full” and that repeaters were too technical for my feeble brain. At least that last statement is something close to true. The rest is mostly true, but there are still a fair number of repeaters going on the air—admittedly in out-of-the-way places—even here in Northern California.

Right now, there are 10 (12 if you could my two that aren’t yet in the list) 2-meter repeaters pending ccoordination in Northern California. And it turns out they aren’t all in such remote locations:

Pending coordinations on 144 MHz:

146.6200 KD6EKH San LuisObispo 7/6/11 New Repeater

146.6250 W6AY Oakland 10/23/10 New Repeater

146.7300 NW6C Mammoth 7/20/11 No Change

146.7750 N1PPP Kelseyville 12/10/10 New Repeater

146.8200 W6BYS Napa 7/5/11 New Repeater

146.8500 K6LNK Orinda 6/13/11 New Repeater

146.9400 KD6EKH Arroyo Grande 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3300 K7DAA Morgan Hill 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3600 K6PAC Lincoln 4/18/11 New Repeater

147.6750 WN6LOO Kelseyville 2/5/11 New Repeater

146.6250 W6AY Oakland 10/23/10 New Repeater

146.7300 NW6C Mammoth 7/20/11 No Change

146.7750 N1PPP Kelseyville 12/10/10 New Repeater

146.8200 W6BYS Napa 7/5/11 New Repeater

146.8500 K6LNK Orinda 6/13/11 New Repeater

146.9400 KD6EKH Arroyo Grande 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3300 K7DAA Morgan Hill 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3600 K6PAC Lincoln 4/18/11 New Repeater

147.6750 WN6LOO Kelseyville 2/5/11 New Repeater

Normally, a repeater is “pending” only for 60 days, allowing other repeater owners to complain if they notice interference. When a repeater is shown to be “pending” for a longer time, especially much longer, it suggests serious interference problems have not been worked out. This makes is much less likely the new repeater will ever be coordinated.

This list is generated and emailed every Monday by NARCC, our local repeater coordination group. I won’t talk about coordination in detail here, except to say that NARCC has a very tough job.

Why me? 

The reason I have these two repeaters—and somebody else doesn’t—is 100 percent because of my emergency work. If I wasn’t trying to provide needed coverage—handie-talkie coverage, especially—I would never have found out about that these pairs were available.

In my case, I happened to ask the right questions, at the right times, of the right people. I’d like to think I’d also built a reputation as a decent guy who works hard and gets things done. Do that and people share information with you, in this case, frequencies worth monitoring, plotting coverage for, and, eventually, dropping a repeater on. One of the pairs has potential for wide coverage, the other will always be pretty local. Coverage is based on non-interference with other users of the frequencies. This can be tricky and will be discussed in detail later.

One repeater’s antenna is about 25 feet up the tower at the highest elevation fire station in San Joaquin County. It uses a 3-element beam and the coverage is actually quite respectable. Though it still needs work, for reasons we’ll later discuss. Why a beam? To avoid two co-channel repeaters as well as to put more signal where we need it, and less where we don’t.

The other repeater—just installed today as I start writing this—has a 5/8-wave whip antenna mounted to a metal plate about 80 feet up a 195 foot tower at another fire station. That repeater needs either a higher gain omni or a directional antenna before it is complete, but it’s on the air and that’s what counts.

Coordination 

Getting a repeater coordinated, under the policies of NARCC, our region’s coordinator is first-come, first-served operation. That means if you know of a good frequency you better keep it a closely guarded secret lest someone else put a repeater there first. That effectively means people are already have repeaters on-the-air are the best candidates for getting new repeaters on-the-air quickly when a frequency pair becomes available.

This is a bit like the seniority system, in that it seems unfair to newcomers but the longer you are around, the more you like it.

Right now, I have two repeaters on the air, new hardware coming for one of them, new hardware being rebuilt for the other, a third repeater being programmed, and a fourth maybe on the way. That means the two repeaters I am already using can be taken out of service.

The very first repeater I used is a loaner and will go back to its owner. The second was constructed from two old GE mobile radios and will become a backup unit.

With two repeaters on the air and three additional repeaters sitting in the shop, I’ll be ready if I have a failure, a friend has a failure, or a new frequency pair presents itself.

I’d love to get a new pair on top of a building in downtown Stockton to improve talkie coverage there or move my better-coverage pair to a taller location and find a low-level pair for local fill-in, if needed, near my home.

Repeater hardware is easy to come by and cheap. What is harder to get—on a budget, anyway—is the expensive and complex duplexer required by the 600 KHz. frequency split on 2-meters. Staying with the split is probably one of the biggest mistakes every made in Amateur Radio. Certainly, it created real (and forever) problems.

That will be the topic of my second post about becoming a repeater owner. 

Why (Special Agent) Johnny (Still) Can't Encrypt

Here is a PDF version of the study, presented at the Usenix Security Conference, that details major security issues with the P25 digital protocol used by public safety agencies. It talks about encryption issues and how to mount a denial-of-service attack, capable of making encryption impossible (and forcing users to communicate “in the open”).

The report does a good job of explaining how P25 works and makes you wonder whether the huge investment in P25 post-9/11 actually bought us anything besides an illusion of protection.

P25 is such a joke!

The news this week that P25 digital radios aren t all they are supposed to be didn t come as a surprise. I want to read the study. It found that users don t know how to secure their radios and the radios are subject to easy jamming. I will comment in detail after reading the report.

Meanwhile, this is the system that is supposed to be protecting America from bad guys, but really just drops lots of money into the pockets of the radio manufacturers who hoodwinked DHS and the FCC into mindlessly supporting this boondoggle.

Read the CNET story. Try not to laugh too much. Crying, however, is perfectly acceptable.

CPI Remotes Solve Radio Location Problems

One of the problems facing Amateur operators working in an EOC, hospital, or other emergency management environment is that the radio is never where you really need it to be. More likely, you need radios in multiple locations, but hardware and antenna feedline issues are holding you back.

For example, I work with one hospital where we’d like to have a radio in the emergency department, another in the emergency manager’s office, and a third in the room they’d use as a emergency operations center. The challenges of coax runs, if nothing else, make thus impractical.

However, having a single radio located at the ER nurses’ station doesn’t make much sense, either. Even if the fire department crews love being able to monitor the radio in an area where talkies don’t work very well.

There is a solution, one which many agencies already use, though generally not for Amateur Radio applications. Here is is:

A Texas company, CPI Communications, offers a line of “radio desksets” (as I call them) that look and work much like a telephone deskset. Big difference: The push-to-talk switch on the handset (which some nurses never seem to remember to use).

The desksets use normal telephone wiring to connect to a terminal device connected to a commercial radio, usually in a radio closet or some other location that is just a short coax run to the antenna.

You can connect multiple desksets to the radio terminals and plug them in as needed around the facility (once the proper wiring is connected).

Using this equipment, you can have access to Amateur or commercial frequencies pretty much wherever you need them—including the ability to monitor or transmit from each location.

Downside? Commerical radios do not have VFOs, so you will need to program all the channels you might need—including simplex and repeater outputs as simplex, perhaps—into the radio. Yes, multichannel desksets are available.

You can also choose a desktop that looks more like a traditional radio control, including a desk mic and, I believe, a headset option.

The equipment is not hugely expensive, and I have included links to some specific product handouts you might want to look at. I’d be interested in hearing what you think about this solution.

 

Here is pricing information

Motorola CDM-1550 information

Motorola CM300 information

Kenwood information

Seven Tips: How to be a Volunteer that Leaders Love

Having spent two months talking about how to build and kill EMCOMM groups, this month I’ll touch on what it takes to be the volunteer every leader wants on his or her team. Here are seven tips:

1. Sign-up and show-up — This is really simple, but can’t be overstated. Leaders need dependable volunteers and need them to commit early. We need to be able to plan based on the number of volunteers we can expect. So sign-up early, let your leader know if your plans are “tentative,” and cancel as soon as you know you cannot attend. That makes the planning job much, much easier. Ten people who become available the “day of” aren’t very helpful, unless I have ten unexpected no-shows.
People respect our group because they know if we commit to something, we will deliver. This group reliability depends on volunteers who are equally reliable.
   
   
2. Dress like an emergency communications professional — I feel stupid saying this, but what we wear impacts the image of all Amateurs. Now that we wear orange or green safety vests much of the time, individual fashion expression is not so apparent to served agencies or the public. However, as unpaid professionals we need to look like the paid professionals we work alongside.
   
   In general, dress in office work/casual office attire when on an assignment, unless you have a special reason (cleared with your leaders) for dressing differently. If you don’t wear an official government-issued patch, I am not wild about uniforms. I have a Sheriff’s SAR uniform - silver badge and all - and I try very hard not to wear it. Polo shirts (with your group’s logo) are almost always the best thing to wear. Try not to have too many logos or call signs (even your own) visible at the same time.
   
   
3. Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! — We all have better and worse days, but great volunteers develop a “game face” and “game attitude” they bring to public events. Whiners are not allowed. Egos get checked at the door. No, it really isn’t about you, it’s just what net control said or did, probably without thinking, and usually in the heat of the moment.
   
   
4. Seek Feedback (And Offer It) — We all need to talk about what we do well as well as where we could improve. Volunteers need to understand that the people who provide feedback (volunteer bosses) are sometimes insensitive louts. Please forgive us. We didn’t mean to hurt your feelings and it really isn’t personal. Nor is it personal when you tell leaders how we might improve. We are here to serve the public and our communities and we win or lose as a team.
   
   The key to this is being a decent human being and treating others the way you’d want to be treated yourself. Sound familiar?
   
   
5. Build Your Skills — Newcomer mistakes must be forgiven. And some people - like me - make the same silly mistakes over and over. But, we need to constantly “sharpen the saw,” as the book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People calls it. Great volunteers sharpen the saw on a regular basis. The reason we provide support for all these bike rides, community fairs, rodeos and other non-emergency events is two-fold. Sometimes these events become real emergencies. Mostly, though, we’re training for when “the big one” (whatever that is where you live) happens. Use these events to train yourself while having fun. Then read, take classes, do free online training, anything to improve your skills. Reading this newsletter is a good use of your time.
   
   
6. Help solve problems — I was really pleased at a recent event when our volunteers at a remote site solved problems that occurred at their location without help from anyone. It was an issue related to signals and geography and these were new hams - all KJ6 call signs - who took initiative and made things better on the spot. And some people say HamCram hams are know-nothings! In the process, they improved our ability to serve the organization we were working for. Great volunteers give great customer service.
   
   
7. Observe Lines of Authority — Not long ago, I came unglued (it had been a bad day) when a fairly inexperienced volunteer tried to do something that went against the goals of the organization. It was not ill-intended, just inexperience. But, it was the second or third problem. This was a hugely promising volunteer, who just needed to understand why certain things are done the way they are. Even insensitive louts sometimes have good reasons behind their logic.
   
   Good volunteers have ideas and want something to do. They want to contribute but can be overly enthusiastic and cause problems without meaning to. Long story short, the volunteer and I decided to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and at his first event he performed marvelously. He wants to become a leader and at the rate he is going, he will. But, he will need to work within the rules of the organization and ask questions before just “doing.”
   
   This is another way of saying, “Respect your elders.” But if you feel your local leaders are killing the group don’t just sit and watch it happen. That is a topic for another column, based on some of the letters I’ve been getting from E-Letter readers.

(This essay originally appeared in the May, 2011 issue of the ARRL ARES E-Letter)

50% Off Depiction Software During April

Depiction is a low-end geographic information system (GIS) that attempts to reduce the complexity of such products and dramatically improve usability. In my experience  and based on 25 years as a professional software reviewer, it only partially succeeds. Further, my discussions with company people have led me to believe they think they have it all worked out, when clearly they don’t.

Nevertheless, if you are willing to invest a lot of time and are unable to learn how to use a professional product (ERSI’s software is the standard), Depiction does offer useful features, but requires a bit of a learning curve and does not always work as advertised (at least for me).

It is in that spirit and the hope the product will continue to improve, that I note the company offers a 50-percent discount (regularly $199) on its products to volunteers during April, which is national volunteer month. If you purchase, also make sure you buy the appropriate add-ons, including APRS and various icon packs (badly needed) for how you plan to use the software. (I am buying icons).

Coming Saturday: Buddipole at Ham Radio Saturday!

Budd Drummond, W3FF, inventor of the Buddipole antenna family, will be speaking this Saturday at Ham Radio Saturday! in French Camp (Stockton), CA. He will be speaking for 9-11am. Details here.