Phil Kane wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 23:05:49 EDT, Steve Bonine wrote:

If there are a dozen repeaters with zero activity, most will go dead in
any disaster because it takes real human interest and work to provide
emergency power. I'd rather have two or three solid repeaters than a
dozen where the maintenance is hit-and-miss and there's no one who
really cares whether they are up or not.

You assume that those repeaters do not have backup power. I found
that this was not the case in the ham communities of San Francisco and
Portland (OR) areas, the two places that I have had extensive
experience with VHF/UHF repeaters. Backup power is relatively easy to
get at those sites where ham and commercial facilities are co-located,
which are most of the places where the ham repeaters are.

I am assuming that a repeater with ZERO activity is a repeater with no
one who cares about it. In one of your previous posts you mentioned a
repeater in your area which is "only" used during commute times and FD;
this is not zero activity and indicates that there is a core group of
people who care about the repeater.

The kind of repeater I'm talking about is one that might have been quite
active a decade ago, but has been running on inertia for several years.
Maybe it still responds to a signal on the input frequency, but the
chance of it having usable backup power is extremely low. Another issue
is potential damage during the disaster; if there is not a group of
people who use the repeater, no one will be there to make the
perhaps-trivial repairs necessary to get it back on the air.

Similarly, you assume that because a repeater is silent that "the
maintenance is hit-and-miss and there's no one who really cares
whether they are up or not". Again, my experience does not bear this
out. Most of the repeaters that are reported "silent" are because
they are kept alive by a small group of people whose activity is not
always observed by the casual ham. I'm the trustee of two club
repeaters maintained by one of the other members who is a 2-way radio
tech. Our 2 meter machine is used all the time by ham-licensed
truckers driving up and down the Interstate. The other is used only
by the few club members who have the 223 MHz band in their radios. The
casual listener would consider that one "unused", which is not the
case.

The key word in your sentence is "used". "Zero activity" is
incompatible with "used".

I said, "I'd rather have two or three solid repeaters than a dozen where
the maintenance is hit-and-miss and there's no one who really cares
whether they are up or not." I did not imply that if a repeater is
silent that the maintenance is hit-and-miss. What I said is that if
there is not a group of people who care about the repeater, it's likely
to be useless in a disaster, and I stand by that statement.

Similarly, during the many hours each day that I spend in my Comm
Center at home - a cross between a home office, a library, and a ham
shack - I maintain a speaker watch on the UHF repeater that my other
local club uses for commute-hour rag chews and is available for use
for hospital disaster communications. Except for the commute hours,
it is "silent" but I'm there to answer any calls and to join in the
rag chews. That seems to be the norm for the "silent" repeaters in
this "no pairs available" area. We do have several where there's
pretty frequent use, though.

Any repeater that has a regular group that uses it during commute does
not fall under the category of "zero activity", and obviously there is a
group of people who care about it.

Repeater-based ham radio is alive and well in Webfoot Country.

Good. I think that perhaps you misinterpreted my initial comment to be
that a repeater needs to have constant activity to be viable, and that's
not what I was trying to say. I do stand by my initial statement that,
given the choice of a dozen zero-use repeaters or a couple of busy ones,
I'll take the lower number of busy ones because they will be more likely
to survive a disaster.

And again let me point out the difference between urban and rural
environments. The simple fact that you have a higher population density
almost guarantees that you have more people using the repeater(s). Of
course, if you have many repeaters, the person-per-repeater number may
be as low as ours.

Our situation here in rural Minnesota is rather marginal. We do have a
local club with a core group of people who care enough about the
repeater to keep it going. On the other hand, our UHF repeater has been
down for almost a year now, and somehow the group has not been able to
get it back on the air, primarily because one person has promised to
provide a new site for the repeater and has not followed through on that
commitment.

We had an actual disaster a few months ago, not in this immediate area
but in rural Minnesota. There was a need for ham radio communications
because the incident was "down in a hole" where cellphones wouldn't
work. (Floods often happen in river valleys.) The response was not
what it should have been. Part of this is due to the low number of
hams, and part is due to the lack of organization.

73, Steve KB9X