"Dan/W4NTI" w4nti@get rid of this mindspring.com wrote in message hlink.net...
"Jim Hampton" wrote in message
...
We have a *ton* of repeaters (I can use more than the 13, but that is the
limit of memory on the old Rat Shack HT) around here. One of the repeater
systems has ports on every band from 10 meters to 1.2 GHz (including 900
MHz). I've chatted with Australia and England via the 10 meter port
(whilst
I was on one of the 440 ports). It really all depends ....


73 from Rochester, NY
Jim AA2QA


I am fully aware of that. There 'used to be' a LOT of 2 meter activity
around here. It all died away. There are 300 licensed hams in Calhoun
county. Maybe 30 are active.

That's ten percent, that's not bad at all. But it depends on the
regional population density which varies enormously across the
country. We have individual suburban townships which have as many as
200 ham residents here in the Delaware Valley region of the NE
corridor. This county alone has 43 municipalities, etc. We still have
the old 2M packet spots system up and running from Virginia well into
New England.

I have no idea what the actual numbers are but it's probably safe to
assume that most of the repeaters in this region have hundreds if not
thousands of potential users each. If even ten percent of 'em got on
the machines there would be complete chaos never mind what would
happen if the whole pack fired up and "got active". My point being
that activity levels in terms of perceptions of activity levels varies
all over the map. Literally. e.g., this patch ain't Calhoun County!

A couple trends I think I'm seeing here at least on 2M are movements
back to FM simplex ops and a noticeable growth in the use of SSB which
is being fueled by the availability of affordable multimode rigs like
the 706 and the 817. Might be that after 35 years or so of repeaters
dominating VHF/UHF ham comms they've run their course for a number of
reasons, the costs of acquisition, installation, maintenance and
operation being what they are.

Another piece of this discussion I think involves what I call the
"Nocode Bubble". We all know that in some huge number of instances
these folk have come into the hobby, jacked up the total head counts
by very large percentages and have left never to be heard from again.
But they're still taking up space on the FCC license servers and
skewing the real-world data by inordinate amounts. Pull the nocode
data out of the mix when talking about activity levels vs. raw head
counts and you get a whole different and much more realistic picture
of ham radio as it really exists in this country.


Dan/W4NTI

w3rv