One of the ironies of Amateur Radio, a hobby centred on Communication, is how siloed it can be. A corollary to the huge breadth of interesting avenues to explore is that it can take quite some effort to pull together information, which is unfortunate as there is so much, and lots of it very useful. Following, a couple of simple initiatives I’ve kicked off to help chip away at obstacles to the flow of useful information.
Firstly, Nets: having first dipped my toes into operating in Amateur Radio by joining one of the HARC evening nets, and receiving an immediate and warm welcome, I’ve always viewed nets as a great communications bridge among AR Club members and outward, and worth supporting and encouraging participation wherever possible.
Yet getting details on nets conducted in a given part of the country – for example, if you’re visiting somewhere new and want to join in and say hi – is a bit of a hit and miss affair: is there a club net? Do they have a website or a Facebook page (and is it up to date)? What’s the frequency (or repeater) and schedule?
I discovered a website launched a year or two ago – NetFinder — The definitive Net Directory for Ham Radio operators – which attempted to address this by crowdsourcing details on nets held around the World (including info on some that I uploaded when I encountered the site). However, while it does indeed list details for a lot of nets, the one thing it does not do is show a map locating the nets listed. From my experience so far, there is almost nothing in Amateur Radio that does not benefit from a map of one sort or another. Spatial context is a powerful value multiplier.
This nagged away at me, until I eventually caved and decided to build a map of nets across the British Isles. What I’ve made (or at least, started) is a shareable Google Maps ‘MyMap’ in which I’ve populated a number of layers with interactive pins that pop up information on a given net when clicked.
The map is, like anything of this nature, a work in progress: so far, it has layers for nets hosted on 2m and 70cm simplex, analogue and digital repeaters and 4m simplex. Once these are substantially populated, I will continue to add other modes and bands. For now, the map is available at this link
Here’s an example of what you’d see if you selected the 2m FM SIMPLEX layer and clicked on the pin near Horsham
The pins for each layer have whatever net information I could find for those locations/clubs/bands/repeaters, where info is available. There are doubtless a number of nets not shown due to a lack of active presence on the internet by the related club or society.
This will be an ongoing project – clubs and nets change over time – and I still have a bunch to add for various modes and bands. However, it’s a start. Please click the link and have a look, and if you have any suggestions, let me know. All new (or corrected) information is welcome.
On another tack: Repeaters. Watching a waterfall display for a well-sited web SDR at various times of the day and night shows that there is, in most cases, a great deal of unused repeater capacity. This is rather unfortunate given the blood, sweat, tears and cost that go into establishing, maintaining, repairing and occasionally re-siting them.
While I don’t labour under the illusion that repeaters will regain the use levels of the late 20th century, they do still have a valid place in the spectrum of Amateur Radio technologies, they’re a (relatively) simple solution, and they do the job.
Extending that line of thought, it seemed to me likely that there are Radio Amateurs who might be encouraged to use repeaters but, perhaps, they haven’t yet connected with other users through clubs or found ready information on activity, and maybe don’t want to try initiate contact in the blind. This leads to a bit of chicken and egg, perpetuating the lack of use.
After pondering this, I concluded that it could only help to provide a tool which takes advantage of other comms solutions we now have available, in this case, using the ‘Community’ option on WhatsApp, and creating under that a number of ‘Groups’ – one corresponding to each repeater – would mean that people who join it could have at their disposal a backchannel dedicated to comms regarding the repeater(s) they use or are interested in.
For practical purposes, I set up 2 such Communities covering (analogue voice) repeaters, one for 2m repeaters and the other for 70cm repeaters:
The Communities are both for repeaters in the IO91 Maidenhead square (there being hundreds of repeaters across the British Isles, I considered that might be biting off a bit more than I could chew).
If you’d like to join either or both WhatsApp Community (and please feel free to let other Amateur know about them), please follow these links:
Rich M7GET