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have your local analog Ham radio repeaters suddenly gone silent? I put up a video a few weeks ago about this very subject, and wow, you guys had a lot of very excellent comments on that subject. I really appreciate everyone coming buy the channel and commenting on that video and saying what they thought about repeaters in their area. Turns out a lot of the areas have repeaters that are active, and that's great. I think you guys should keep that going,
keep it active, and keep doing what you're doing. Okay, some comments say that their areas have not had active repeaters in years, and that's where I issued my challenge and said, well, key up your repeaters once a day or one to two times a week and just throw your call sign out and see if you can create some activity on these repeaters to go to get them more active and get them more useful. But a couple of the comments kind of had a theme to it, and I want to discuss those
with you today. So there's a theme to a couple of these comments that I personally don't agree with, but I would like very much to hear what you guys think about this. Now. I'm not trying to call anyone out. I'm not trying to troll anyone. I'm just trying to be honest about some of these comments. And I picked out three of these comments, and I would value your comment in this video below, So let me know what you think by commenting on this video. But I wanted to respond to a
couple of these comments because they're all kind of the same thing. This person says, I don't operate VHF, UHF or use repeaters. Tried it once thirty years ago, but then decided HF was more fun. I think probably the problem with inactive repeaters is a generational shift. That might be true. FT eight on HF now carries the line's share of HAM activity. Cell phones took the magic out of repeaters years ago, and the generation that developed and
popularized repeaters is dying off. Well, first of all, I think so the HF thing, He's not the only one to make this comment about HF or more people on HF, more people are, less people are on repeaters, more people on HF. I don't think that's a thing. Okay. I think if you're if you're trading one for the other, then you're missing out on what HAM radio actually is about. Okay, because I think you,
well, you can do both. Okay. Now, are you driving to work every day and when you get in your car and go places, when you drive around town and run errands, are you talking on HF mobile then okay? Then okay, Okay, hopefully you're not doing FT eight mobile okay, or if you are, you just kind of got it clicking over here where you're not looking at the screen of the tablet or computer while you're driving. Okay. But to each I guess I'm not gonna tell you how
to drive. So the point is that why are you not using repeaters during drive time? But yeah, home too. If you're doing a lot of HF at home, and if you're doing HF mobile, then okay, but these are two very different areas of HAM radio, and I don't think you should say I'm not I don't use this one because I use this one. If you don't enjoy VHFUHF, then okay, that's one thing that's a totally different subject. If you just don't enjoy talking on FM repeaters, fine,
fine, it's not for everybody, Okay. The great thing about HAM radio is there's so many things inside of HAM radio you can do. Find the thing that you enjoy and do that. Okay, even if you never pick up a microphone at all, find the thing that you enjoy and do that. So I don't really get the whole HF thing, you know, I think you can do both. I do HF. I do HF from the shack, I do PoTA, But I also talk on repeaters when I'm driving around town in my truck. When I'm on road trips, I'll use mobile
HF. But generally speaking, I don't use mobile HF if I'm just driving around town, running errands, going short distances and that kind of thing. But the thing that really the theme we're going to talk about here today is cell phones took the magic out of repeaters years ago, and the generation that developed and popularized repeaters is dying off. That last part's probably true because repeaters
became popular sometime in the nineteen sixties. A lot of these police and police and fire departments started dumping their FM repeaters and they crossbanded to amateur they covered amateur radio bands. That's why you see a lot of these ge Master two repeaters that are still in use today, fifty sixty years later. These repeaters
are still working. Back in the sixties, they had wide band, a lot of them were starting to go nuroband analog, a lot of them were starting to go to like a scrambled system back then, and they started dumping these repeaters, these older repeaters, from newer repeaters. And that's a lot of the times how we got our initial FMM radio repeaters. So a big story behind that that I'm not including here. We can talk more about that
later. But my comment to this guy was strange. I'm not aware of a cell phone where you can doll a number and talk to a dozen people all at once. I guess you could. You could set up a party line. Okay, party lines back in the sixties and seventies on your telephone,
okay, your regular landline telephone long before cell phones. I guess you could set up a party line, or you could connect to a zoom conference and you and all your buddies driving to work together in the morning could talk to one another on this zoom conference that you probably have password protected and no one has the link for except your little group there. And if that's what you want to do, then perfect do that. But I don't think relating
cell phones to repeater activity is accurate. Sure, sure, yeah, if you have an emergency now, you can pick up the cell phone, you say, Man, I had a flat tire, I was in an automobile accident. I'm not. No one's hurt, hopefully, that kind of thing. Yeah, But I'm talking about just regular driving to work back and forth, driving around town back and forth, talking on your repeater, using the
repeater during storm outages, during storm watches, during bad weather events. These are the things that repeaters are still great for that you can't really do with a cell phone because you can only generally die one person at the time with the cell phone. So who are you gonna call ghost? Okay, Well, that's cool. Sometimes happens, someone has to deal with it, and who are you gonna call? But I mean, the repeater is far reaching.
Everyone turned on a radio in your area and everyone was monitoring a repeater in your city or your county. Then everyone could talk back to you, and when you said something, everyone would hear it, not just the one person on the other end of your cell phone. The next comment I got says, I think that it may have to do with cell phones. Again, I don't. I kind of see where you're coming from this, but I don't really agree with it. And I'm trying to explain why in this
video. Back in the day, people would get their licenses just for access to repeaters for auto patch emergencies. And then the next comment says, bingo hit the nail on the head, and the third comment says, that was a big part of my motivation. I talked on auto patches back in the day. I used to call I was in college when I got my first ham radio license. I used to call my mom on the repeater and she didn't I had to explain to her, don't talk when I'm talking because it's
half duplex. But it was fun to do. And yeah, emergencies cool, Yeah, that's that's cool. Also, if that's your motivation for getting your hand radio license, then great, awesome. But if that's the only reason you ever use the repeaters, you missed out on a lot of things. I don't think that this is true. I was surprised to see two people comment to this and say, oh, yeah, that's me, that's me, that's me. I've never personally talked to anyone where they say that
the only reason they talked on repeaters was to use the phone patch. A lot of the repeaters in my area didn't even have phone patches. The major ones did. The major club repeaters had phone patches back in the day. I think a couple of them still have a phone patch, honestly. But to use repeaters solely for the purpose of a phone patch or access to a phone patch, I think you miss out on a lot of really cool features of a repeater system. Now, if you're interested in getting your amateur radio
license for the use of a repeater, you may not know. If you don't have a license, then there's three levels of license in the USA. The technician is the first license, and with a technician you can use all these repeaters we're talking about. And if you're interested in doing that, I just you go over to hamradioprep dot com check out their full line of classes for all three levels of amateur radio license inside the United States. They have
a Bowfang's Basics class. They have an HF a new to HF class HF Basics Class. You can save a twenty percent discount on all of their plans with the coupon code of Jason twenty and you can download their app on your smartphone for free. So grab your smartphone right now. If you're interested in getting licensed for the first time or getting your upgrade, download Ham Radio Prep
on iOS or Android play a Google play store. Get started for free today, and thank you Ham Radio Prep for sponsoring this channel and the last time we'll talk about today, says I wonder if cell phones and emails have created this repeater silence during the time when making landline calls to other near areas where long distances were more expensive. That's not a complete sentence, but I get what you're saying. I wonder if that was when the repeaters were used more
often. Okay, okay, once again, there's probably some bearing to that. There's probably some true to that. I'm not saying that this is a wrong sentiment. In fact, you're probably right. You can't really unless you had linked repeater systems which were not linked over the internet back then. Then you couldn't really call out of your calling area to where a long distance thing was. But you could call through a phone patch and get some stuff like
that and call you couldn't. I don't think you could dial long distance on most phone patches. Those were mainly used for emergencies. If you broke down somewhere, you need to call someone to come get you. Now here's the thing. If you break down somewhere today and you don't have smartphone coverage for whatever reason, you don't really need a phone patch if people are monitoring the
repeater. If you call out on a repeater and you say, hey, KC five hw use your own call sign KC five HWB, I've got a minor emergency. My vehicle's broken down and I can't call anyone. Is anyone
monitoring the repeater that it has access to a phone. I've done some rescue stories on this channel about HF operators out in the middle of nowhere that broke down or got one guy got stuck in the mud, at Big Bend, and they use HF radio to call back to a HAM radio operator, so the HAM radio operator could pick up the phone and call emergency services in that area, or call their family, or call somebody and let them know where
they were. Okay, So that's still a thing. So even if you don't have access to a smartphone, a cell phone or a phone patch, you can call on the repeater and hopefully if we can get repeaters more active again, which if in case you haven't figured it out yet, my goal here is to get your repeater more active. I would love to be able to drive through your area and talk to you on your repeater, but I
can't do that everywhere. We can do linked repeaters via all Star, and if you're interested in all Star, connect to my node four three one three six. It's running twenty four to seven. We've got some cool updates that are coming to that soon. But I monitor that node system most not every day, but most every day. But I also try to key up my
local repeaters most days to get more activity on there. In fact, i'm monitoring this repeater that I'm monitoring right now is a Hearst repeater on NOPE right there I can't see it and see it. I'm monitoring one seven. The Hurst Amateur Radio Club repeater. Hurst is one of the ones that does a
lot of these classes that are on my channel. They have some pretty good activity on the repeater every afternoon, and I was talking to some guys here earlier just this morning, and then the Uless repeater are the one that I'm mostly on four forty two nine hundred. Several of you commented on that last video and said you were going to try that repeater next time you're in the area, So do that. Let me know in the comments below what you
think about phone patches and cell phones. I don't think they were Yeah, they were a slight detriment to why the repeaters are silent, but again they're not the same thing. A cell phone's a great tool to have, carry it with you everywhere. Do that, but you can talk to a larger group of people over a larger area that are all in your local area experiencing the same traffic delays, experiencing the same storms, the same tornadoes, the
same tornado watch, the same radar watch, the same storm warnings. You can you can communicate to a wider area of people more quickly and effectively than poking up the cell phone and calling twelve or fifteen different people in separate phone calls to talk about what's going on in your area. Please comment blow let me know what you think about this and if you liked this video, I've got more videos about this subject that I will link over here. Seventy three guys, Thanks for watching today,