It is twenty twenty five, and I have a repeater challenge to issue to everybody that watches this channel in all of the Ham radio community, and that is going to include me. At the beginning of twenty twenty four, I spoke about how I would like us to start keying up our repeaters once a day every day, just some local repeater close to you where you are, something like that, and that went pretty well for a while. I do admit that I kind of slacked off on
that myself. I was towards the end of the year. I was doing it like maybe once a week, maybe once every other week, something like that. During travel times and road trips, you're not necessarily close to your home repeater, maybe you can connect via all starback to it or via yaseev DMR, depend on what your home repeater is. But for twenty twenty five, I want to continue and
upgrade this initiative. I mentioned on a couple of live streams in December that I've budgeted some money for some HF Radio giveaways starting in January of twenty twenty five, and in order to sign up for those, I will have a different email list sign up per month, so be watching on the channel for that sign up in my email list Hamradio two dot com forward slash email dash sign up. That's the main list. I'll have separate lists for all the giveaways, but for the repeater challenge,
I thought, what I might do is this. Now, you guys tell me if this is a good idea, you know, and we can change. This can change a little bit throughout the first six or eight months of the year. We'll see how it goes. At the end, I want you guys to key up your local repeaters once a day, and I want you to keep a log of it.
We're Ham radio operators. We love keeping log books, right, Okay, So I want you to keep a log of every time you key up a local repeater, the repeater frequency, the location, city, state is fine, and if you made a contact or not, yes or no, and then if you had a conversation, just give a brief summary of what it's about. It doesn't have to be detailed. There's
not like a checklist you have to do. Just give enough information that you remember the contact and you can refer back to it and it's obvious what happened during that exchange. So at the end of every month, probably on my lasts live stream of the month. I live stream at seven pm every Sunday night. Put that on your calendar seven pm Texas time, which is zero one
hundred UTC. On Monday, I live stream. I do a live stream on the channel just about every week, probably on the last live stream of each month, for the first several months of twenty twenty five. And I hope this continues to go through the whole year. I am I'm going to ask for those lists. Say if anyone did this challenge, even if you just jotted it down, and if you didn't do it every day, that's okay.
If you did it a couple of days a week and you jotted down you only have eight or ten entries at the end of the month, fine, no problem. Jot it down. Email me that list and at the end of that month. I spoke about budgeted funds for giveaway radios a moment ago. At the end of that month, we're gonna give away a brand new duel band VHF UHF radio. Jaz, you just released a brand new dual band radio plus two monoban two meter radios. The FtM
six thousand is still a fantastic radio from Yazoo. The FtM three hundred, two hundred and five hundred are all still in production. The Icon twenty seven thirty is a great dual band radio. Kenwood's about to release a new dual hopefully tryband radio sometime at the beginning and hopefully in Q one of twenty twenty five. We'll see how that goes. So we've got several dual band VHF UHF radios that we can choose from as a giveaway, and I want to pick one of you guys every month
for the first several months. We'll see how long it lasts. If I keep getting emails with log reports of repeater activity at the end of every month, someone's gonna win something, Okay. So if you're the only one. If the first month I get one hundred entries, great. If the second month I get twenty entries and the third month I only get five entries, that makes your chances a lot better
if you're one of the ones submitting entries. So key up your repeater every day, your local repeater every day, whicheveryone's local to you, whichever one you like to use, whichever one you think might actually get some activity. Key up your repeater every day, make a log of it, make a note of what you did, which repeater it is. Want to do multiple repeaters, that's fine, there's no rules here.
Just keep a log of what you do. Hopefully make some contacts, and we're gonna get more repeater activity going in twenty twenty five, mainly focusing on analog repeaters. Here analog repeaters to talk to people local to you. But if hey, if the repeater you like to use is a DMR or a d STAR or a system fusion repeater, that totally counts to so key up your repeater every day, start some conversations, get more activity on the repeaters. Keep a logbook entry that you will mail to me at
the end. Email to me at the end of every month, and someone's gonna win a radio at least for the first two or three months, and we'll see how it goes. Seventy three guys, and thanks for being part of the Ham radio community.