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

Mark Kramer wrote:
Steve Bonine wrote:
Better
to have two or three active repeaters in a metro area than a dozen dead
ones.

Until there is an emergency and those two or three repeaters aren't
sufficient to support the emergency services operations going on.

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.

An emergency service organization should put up and maintain their own
repeaters. For example, in the last 3 years, the Southern Nye County (NV) ARES
group put up and maintain four repeaters (2 on 2M and 2 on 70cm) so we will have
them in emergencies. We make a point to talk on them at least once a day to
make sure they work. But 99% of the time they are idle, and thus may appear to
the casual observer to be unused.

73 de Dick, AC7EL

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:01:28 EDT, Dick Grady AC7EL
wrote:

An emergency service organization should put up and maintain their own
repeaters. For example, in the last 3 years, the Southern Nye County (NV) ARES
group put up and maintain four repeaters (2 on 2M and 2 on 70cm) so we will have
them in emergencies. We make a point to talk on them at least once a day to
make sure they work. But 99% of the time they are idle, and thus may appear to
the casual observer to be unused.

If the area is urban enough. In rural Alberta we don't have a lot of
overlap between repeaters. But it's clearly understood by everyone
that emergency service has complete priority over all other traffic.

In Edmonton, a city of about 1 million yes they do have a repeater
dedicated to ARES without a lot of other chatter on it.

Tony