A far better idea would be to abandon the “terrestrial repeater rule”. Would help activators, chasers, repeater users and increase ham traffic on those bands.
I’ll get my coat… 
73, Alfred, OE5AKM
I spot via APRS where possible, hey, it’s all traffic.
73 de HB9/OE6FEG/P
Matt
I’ld support that!
[Re Don G0NES’s comment] As a retiree with dodgy joints already carrying two radios, a pole, 2m vertical, HF dipole, etc to those tops, I would take the '817 and 2m Yagi if I thought there was a reasonable prospect of having a QSO.
I moved (almost a year ago) from JO01 to IO81, and just recently got a 2m FM rig up and running at the new QTH. Easy contacts on 2m FM with G/WB-006 and G/CE-001 last Thursday, so it’s much easier to make FM contacts from IO81tq than from JO01ai, but then my new QTH is high up and can see quite a way north, while my old QTH had a rather more limited view…
As I always say, VHF seperates hams into haves and have nots. I know from bitter experienc what a huge difference it is when you move house from a valley location to a hilltop and vice versa. Few valley dwellers will persist with VHF if they have an alternative, there have been periods in my life when I packed away my 2m and 70cm gear because the location was just plain impossible!
Totally agree Brian - I have only managed one QSO on VHF at home. Despite being 1000 ft up am almost totally surrounded by things that are even higher, even struggle to get a signal from the BBC on 90MHz and they use quite big masts and a lot of power! ( the one QSO was Burnhope Seat!)
Mind you the glass is half full with lots of hills nearby!
Paul
I’ve just realised we’re comparing different things here. I’m convinced that 2m FM activity is healthy and continuing to steadily rise - from the perspective of a SOTA activator on hilltops.
Whereas you guys are bemoaning the silence on S20 all day on your home shack radios. We’re probably both right. If anybody did as much VHF activating as me, they would probably share my positive assessment.
Well, kind of. Remember this thread is about potentially losing the 2m band to commercial interests.
It doesn’t help our cause and arguments we make to try to convince the regulatory authorities to continue the status quo if the band activity is low and getting lower.
We may have won this battle but the war goes on.
Very, very true.
It may or may not be easier now to qualify an activation on 2 metres, but it is beyond question that activity is a pale shadow of what it used to be thirty, twenty or even ten years ago. The big conundrum is how to increase general activity - I mean, it is no good getting several hundred stations on the band for a major contest if for the rest of the year all you can hear is repeater IDs - and crickets! As I have pointed out, SOTA does its bit to maintain activity, albeit rather sporadically. The other special interests do their bit, too, MS, Es and aurora come to mind as instances, though if you exclude those who struggle with rare Ar on phone (I’ve done that, too) and the occasional Es opening in summer, the amount of bandwidth needed is small and doesn’t make a good argument for the status quo. The simple truth is that much of the old activity in the UK was from those “B” licenced hams who were restricted to V/UHF, and those of them with moderate or poor QTHs were only too happy to decamp to HF! There is nothing that will bring them back, and nothing really for them to come back to. I would say that the only sort of thing that could increase activity on V/UHF is a challenge or activity that would re-invigorate those with fair to good locations that have given up because of the lack of activity. If WAB and SOTA can just hold the activity at its current level then it needs to be something new, but I can offer no suggestion about what that something new might be.
This observation may not be received well here, but it is a positive in the context of the “use it or lose it” concept:
144.174MHz - the 2m FT8 frequency - has almost constant activity going on.
One single frequency is better than nothing but not enough.
73, Alfred, OE5AKM
I’m simply making the point that FT8 mode, love it or hate it, is meaning that the 2m band is ALWAYS being used.
BTW Alfred, I am actually sympathetic to your opinion that repeaters should be permitted. However, given that SOTA has operated for over 17 years without this, it is not wise to change this fundamental concept now. I also know that the vast majority of participants in SOTA do not share your support for repeaters nor my sympathy for your proposal, and the disquiet this rule change would bring is really not worth the trouble.
It makes total sense to remain with all the original principles, which are widely and well understood.
The fundamental argument against the use of repeaters is that if you work four stations through a repeater, you have actually just worked one station, the repeater, four times. If we then rule that you have to work a minimum of four repeaters then it becomes possible to work one station through four repeaters, which I think is highly unsatisfactory, so the rule would have to be extended to four different stations through four different repeaters. Then we have to consider how to deal with a mix of repeater and simplex contacts…
It isn’t simple, and perhaps we should avoid the distraction when the MT is bringing so many new Associations and facilities on line.
IO94 is even quieter. I used to have a 5 ele beam for 2m on my house with a rotator along with my wire antenna when living at home with my parents and first licensed in early 2000’s. Eventually got bored of the same handful of people being on the end of the rig and no excitement, except for one night i remember getting Birmingham on 2m fm, that was fun.
IO94 I can get the occasional G/TW summit call but other than that its dead. A lot of people have moved to digital 2m so at least that part of the band is getting used.
When on a hill however 2m suddenly comes alive and its always got activity, if you have good takeoff. I always am amazed when I’m walking up a hill when you start getting to the top of above the surrounding hills 2M suddenly comes alive. Its like walking up into a new band.
I think I’ll have to do a 2M contest sometime to see what its like.
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Better still - if I was involved in deciding whether to let Amateurs keep the band (which of course I’m not) the use of relatively new modes, working at or below noise level, with new versions being developed and brought out to experiment with, would be a good argument.
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Yes, a good argument for reducing the size of the band! “Look how many stations they can cram into a few kHz!”
Probably!
I don’t know whether anyone monitors the band, but if it were just being used by lots of us chatting about nothing in particular, all using much the same off the shelf radios, I’m not sure that they would see that as justification to let us keep it.
I don’t want to see it lost, but I think we will only get to keep it if there is some enthusiastic take up of new developments - rather than us trying to make it look used.
When I started on 2m, it was mostly AM or CW on fairly random crystal frequencies - wherever the surplus 8MHz crystal happened to multiply…
Then came channelised FM, and repeaters, frequency synthesis,
Satellites
SSB, first VXO then VFO / synthesiser
Bigger and better antennas, higher power amplifiers, lower noise preamps.
etc etc.
I may have the order wrong, and have missed things out, but there was fairly constant change and development bringing in new people and new ideas. Then it all slowed down.
I’m not sure what comes next, but I don’t think this band, or any other amateur band, will survive in the long term if it just becomes a bit of a nostalgic museum piece.
What is different using non-terrestrial repeaters? In this case it is no problem at all to work 4 stations through one repeater. So why constructing problems with ground-based repeaters? Seems somewhat illogical to me…
I understand you want to keep peace in the community. That´s fine but will not help the 2 m band.
73, Alfred, OE5AKM
I remember Tom, G3BA appearing in the middle of the crystal-controlled AM action with VFO SSB via a transverter, he was keen on us adopting VOX, too, but transverter SSB was slow in its uptake until the Liner-2 and its VFO-controlled descendents rendered it more or less obsolete. The thing is, all these developments - geographical band plan giving way to planning by modes, replacement of AM by FM and SSB, repeaters, satellites, gateways and Satan knows what else, all this took place gradually over a span of fifty years, partly driven by the evolution of components (remember how the appearance of the AF139 et al transformed 70cm receivers?) - it was not a series of revolutions, it was a process of slow evolution. As has been pointed out, it has not come to a halt, the apparent hiatus denied by the quiet explosion in digimodes - and perhaps soon these digimodes will find more purpose than just being used for their own sake and bare-bones DX-ing!
And exactly the same argument applies to the use of Web SDRs to “work” stations, does it not?
73,
Walt (G3NYY)