Bromley Repeater Group

You may be wondering why I’ve recently taken the step of replacing the repeater hardware… 

After all, the repeater was working quite well to begin with.

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about the way that ‘digital’ has impacted amateur radio and in particular how it’s affected the ‘local’ amateur radio communities, qso’s and repeaters.

I have always felt that the whole point of putting a repeater on air was to provide a service for fellow amateurs and by doing so, facilitate the building of a community of radio amateurs, clubs and club members within the footprint area of the repeater.

Our repeaters achieved this and have always had a group of loyal users and supporters but over the years things change, people’s priorities and lives change and so does their geographical location in many cases.
The advent of digital modes has also been a change and now with internet gateways connected to repeaters it’s possible to easily connect to more or less anywhere in the world from your shack, mobile or handie which is great !

But this has had a detrimental impact on the community in my opinion, and I believe it’s largely because of the way many repeater keepers run their repeaters.

So I’ve been talking to people and to some of the local clubs and their members to try and find out what they want from the repeater, asking how they want to use it and what facilities they want from it and the answers are interesting.

Many amateurs who have taken to the digital voice modes now connect using hotspots and reflectors making the reflectors the ‘hub’ of the community rather than the repeaters. Having a reflector as a digital community hub is a great idea because it allows users to connect from anywhere in the world so people who move away from the repeater’s home location do not move away from the repeater’s local community.

HUBNET is an excellent example of how this has affected the repeater network and local repeater communities across the UK.

Don’t get me wrong though, HUBNET is an excellent system and concept which works very well. It has acquired its own community and has many followers but many repeater keepers who’s local users have migrated away from their local repeater to the convenience of a hotspot and reflector have responded by simply connecting their repeater to hubnet as well, simply in order to get some traffic on their now deserted repeater.

These repeaters consequently become simply ‘broadcast boxes’ with little or no RF activity as everyone chats on the ‘hub’ reflector.
Another consequence is that the few people still using RF and a repeater to connect are faced with a complete lack of variety as every repeater they connect to carries the same Hubnet ‘channel’ and traffic.

HUBNET’s success means there is plenty of activity on it but it can be difficult to hold a qso and, as the channel (and any repeater connected to it) is so busy, capturing a local repeater in order to move it to a different reflector can also be difficult or at times impossible, so for someone wishing to use the repeater for a local chat rather than broadcasting around the entire country via a large number of repeaters connected to the reflector, becomes impossible.

The result is often that the user turns off his radio, and as his local repeater along with all the other repeaters in range are constantly busy with Hub traffic, and as the simplex channels are largely deserted… he packs his golf clubs into the boot of his car and heads off to play with his balls instead !

Leaving the simplex channels dead and almost every repeater in the country regurgitating HUBNET.

Hey presto, you have witnessed the death of the local repeater communities, not to mention local club nets in the evenings and local group chats during the day.

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So what is the solution ?

GB7OK and GB7LO are going to be run differently. Our intention is to try to get back to local community based amateur radio with all its variety and values.

The new Yaesu repeater has the best of both worlds.

Yaesu System Fusion is the easiest digital mode to use and access with no radio codeplug to program and simple repeater like operation. The new repeater also has good old FM capability using Yaesu’s AMS (automatic mode select) which detects whether an incoming signal is using Analogue FM or Digital YSF.

The repeater’s default digital hub connection will not be HUBNET or another heavy traffic reflector, it will be one of the Bromley Repeater Group’s own reflectors which were created specifically to provide for our own repeaters and our own community of users in London and the Southeast. This doesn’t mean you won’t be able to access Hubnet or any other reflector using our repeater but we hope it will mean that members of the original GB3OK and GB7OK/GB7LO community who have moved away from the area will be able to reconnect with old friends and colleagues, while at the same time allowing the newer generation of amateurs who favour digital access to participate in the fray.

Meanwhile, there are still a number of Analogue FM users who will also be able to access and use the repeater and join with the community.

We feel that both digital and analogue systems have their place and we believe both systems can exist side by side serving both sets of users.

 

 

 

You can’t be too careful when you’re running your shack from your home network.

So here you go, my Network Security Tip #1 for anyone with an Internet connection in the shack.

Don’t get hacked !

Here’s what to do if you find you have been ‘haxored’.

Change all your device and system passwords making sure that they’re all different and make them much bigger/longer with a mixture of symbols randomly arranged, avoid words or names which can be found in a dictionary… use two factor auth when ever you can and read your server logs on a regular basis,

I read mine pretty much everyday, try /var/log/apache2/ if you’re not sure where your webserver log is…

Webserver logs can be a mine of information but I’ll make that part of Tip #2