Issue #25: Heard on the 2m Band . . .

Here's your opportunity to express your opinions about the value of the 2m band for amateur communications. Dave's editorial is a gripe about some of the really trashy uses of the frequencies now taking place (a belching contest? C'mon now.) Of course, it's a set of valuable frequencies. How can we begin to establish more activity on the 2m band? Post your comments here. If you haven't yet seen the article, it is at this link.

 

I agree whole-heartedly with what you're saying. While I'm familiar with the Phoenix metro area, I currently live in a very rural area in upstate New York. To say 2 meter here is dead would be an understatement. The morning and evening weather nets are pretty much it. Alas, of suggestions to fix this I have none. Wish I did. On our repeater, myself and one or two others do get on every so often, just to have a little chat, but it seldom attracts any other operators joining in. I make it a point to answer anyone who puts their call out, no matter what I'm doing at the time, just to get some activity going.

The "intestinal gas" contest you related, unfortunately, isn't an isolated incident. Some time back I was driving in western Massachusetts, listening to the Mt. Greylock repeater, which has wide-area coverage. Some yahoo got on during a net and started berating the participants, asking why they weren't doing something useful instead of talking on the radio (I'm paraphrasing to be polite). Again, I'm short on solutions, short of everyone doing DF to find the culprits.

Keep the postings coming.

Marshall, KA2TSD

 

Thanks Marshall. One problem with editorializing on something like this is that people will come back to me and think that I am telling them how to operate their radios. That happened in my column about "Ditching the One Minute QSO" . . . I don't mind being a bit prickly to get a conversation started, but in this case the topic is SO important, as the entry point to our amateur radio service is 2 meters 90% of the time Thank you for your positive comment and I hope you'll stay with this thread discussion in case others jump in with some ideas. 73, Dave

 

I'm fortunate. Our club is pretty active including a sprinkling of teens and young adults. The club 2 meter repeater is our local hangout and there's a good bit of activity. We do "misuse" the repeater with lengthy chit chat but doing so is encouraged because many members couldn't be heard in simplex. We respect the time out and encourage anyone to join the conversation.

 

I agree with the ARRL's direction. 2m is dead in many areas. Give the techs some play space on HF. HF is the main reason I upgraded. I already knew I needed it, though. Let them want to upgrade.

 

Thanks Norm. You are lucky indeed. You could listen for weeks on 2m in this area and catch not more than an occasional short comment from someone, other than regularly scheduled nets.

 

I feel the major problem is that the hobby has gone from an experimenters hobby to a communicator hobby similar to cb. The new hams have no skin in the game at all. They go online and memorize a bunch of questions get a license and a 25 dollar radio off amazon. Once the novelty of being able to get on the repeaters and make a few contacts, they get bored and do stupid stuff. Nobody builds any more or tries to learn anything beyond how to put up an antenna and hook up a radio to coax. If you build and experiment, you have more pride in what you are doing. And please dont tell me that allowing entry level hams on hf will help. The majority of hams would still stay techs and later on petition the arrl to get them all of the hf bands. Incentives to upgrade never worked. We have lowered the bar to increase our numbers and in the process, lowered the expectations of our members. Let the flames begin.

 

Note: I've lived in the DC Metro area since becoming licensed, so my entire "ham life" has been in this area and I may have missed things that are more common elsewhere.

In 17 years of being a ham, I can't say I've ever heard something as crass as a belching contest on 2m (have heard similar things on HF though). Because my ham station and "home office" are one in the same, I monitor 146.52 most days while working. Virtually everything I hear falls into 3 categories: Some guy testing a new piece of gear, legit and legal chit-chat between hams, and SOTA/POTA activity.

Back in the early days of covid, 2m was HOT around here. There was always someone calling CQ, testing something, or hilltopping. A lot of that has died off and I haven't heard the hilltopper (he was also an experimenter) in about a year, but it was there.

One of our local clubs (next county over from me) also has an active repeater with lots of young people involved (I'm 50, so mainly consider folks in the 20s and below as stereotypical "young people"). I also hear a fair number of younger hams on the air via 2m. A few weeks ago when a buddy and I were finishing up a SOTA activation, I put out a call on 146.52 to see if I could nab a few more while waiting for him and got 2 new hams who were out hiking some 20-30 miles away. It's not all doom and gloom.

You asked how do we encourage more activity on 2m. You mentioned SOTA, which happens to be my favorite radio activity and is very accessible to a ham with an HT as long as they are near the mountains. You also mentioned POTA but observed that few use VHF for POTA. It happens (I've worked a few 2m POTA activators). It probably won't work well in an isolated park, but big parks in large Metro areas (such as The Mall in DC or the Manassas Battlefield Park in my own town) would likely be successful on 2m.
Maybe I'll put my money where my mouth is and try this.
Also, while some folks don't like contesting, the VHF contests are a lot of fun with an HT. Would you believe I'm able to get into the top 10 nationwide and be #1 in my state as a "single operator FM" op with an HT and a j-pole antenna? We'll ignore the fact that I'm the only SOFM entry in VA...
Then there are all of the other VHF activities that are accessible to a mere Tech with an HT such as Hilltopping, Satellites, and so on. Let's stop making VHF and HTs about repeaters and start talking about all the other things you can do with them.

ETA: The main reason I think we should encourage more 2m simplex use is that it's accessible, affordable, requires little space, and can be incorporated into other activities that don't lend themselves to HF (such as cycling, hiking, hanging out with family at the park, etc).

Chris

 

Our club weekly 2 meter net is also generally well attended. I'm told that our new 6 meter repeater net is growing but I'm not set up for that.

 

Chris, Hello from Central Illinois. I love your positive attitude, and it is apparent you are a people person, at least to some degree lol. You have a great over all attitude, a sincere love for Ham Radio....In this specific case 2m simplex and repeaters...You are quite the encouraging individual, and I am very confident you are having a positive impact on individual Ham Radio Operators, and Ham Radio over all. Keep on doing what you are doing my friend, as you have something positive and real about you....Pay no mind to the negative nannies here, as they have no impact on the great positive impact you personally are having on Amateur Radio...... You are my kind of Ham.

 

Any discussion about a deterioration of operating practices on the ham bands is incomplete without the mention that many ham radio operators got their start in radio on a mostly lawless radio service. Does obtaining a ham radio license mean they are going to change the ways?

This is the point where the "but ham radio operators do it also" crowd jumps in to tell us "well what about 7200 or 20 meters". What about them, they are not entire bands or radio service.

Add to that societal decline exhibited by out of control crime in many of our major cities and none of it is surprising. You can do the search on the Nordstrom store where a mob in broad daylight walked out with about 100K of merchandise that happened in last 2-3 days.

 

It's a shame how 2 meters is now dead in many areas of the country. Back in the "good old days" 40 or 50 years ago it was common to find a bunch of hams gathered on one of the few repeaters around almost every night. Sometimes one ham would need to talk to another about something but that wasn't a problem. They'd do their business and usually hang around for the evening "visiting". It was just understood that all were welcome to join in and the more the merrier. Work and family took me away for several years and now everything is basically dead. Oh, occasionally you might get a short QSO but that's the exception rather than the rule. As I think back most of the folks on were older and are now silent keys. Now the young guys are the older ones and I guess things died off with the older generation.
As far as HF privileges for the techs, I say it's way past time! How are you going to keep people interested in amateur radio if there's no one to talk to? Those proposed privileges would give them a taste of what's really out there. They work a few on the high end of the bands and get interested in HF. Now, if I could get on the lower end of the band look at all that DX out there.... The digital privileges would be the icing on the cake. But, let's not forget that those techs would now be immediately able to participate in the public service and emergency nets. They'd learn proper procedure for the real emergencies. (how many know how to handle traffic)
I don't have the answers on how to get things started again so I can't be any help in that respect. Amateur radio is a great asset and it will be a real shame if it goes by the wayside.

 

We recently did a Western US and Canadian Rockies road trip in our camper van. 5150 miles, 31 days. I note this because I don’t normally monitor 2M when I’m home. More on that later. I monitored 52 while on the road and called every hour or so. I talked with one SOTA station in the cascades. That was it. Otherwise NADA. I didn’t monitor any repeaters enroute, just 52.

With more technicians now than there were hams when I started using 2M back in the day, I was surprised there wasn’t more activity.

I can posit a few hypothesis:
The utility of 2M has been supplanted by other means of communication. When I lived in the Chicago area there were a lot of younger hams that used to hang out on 52 and 55. The repeater operators made it clear they didn’t want our kind rag chewing on their machines. Now there are other ways for like minded people to communicate in groups.

The defacto radio has become the HT, a poorly performing short range compromise radio at best, with popular inexpensive models having less than marginal performance. You can’t talk to people that can’t hear you.

Repeaters are often run by cliques, tight knit groups that often subtly and not-so-subtly discourage use by outsiders. There are exceptions, sure. The advent of large area linked machines has exacerbated this situation, I seldomly hear casual conversations on these networked machines.

As far as poor manners, communication reliability seems to breed malfeasance in some, be it on 2M or 80M. Add HCOOH and you get LIDS.

Maybe I’ll start listening more on 2M. Make a call or two. You never know what interesting people you’ll meet OTA.

 

Hi Mark, I don't think you'll get too many "flames" here . . . that's a fairly commonly held belief by hams who were licensed back in 'the day' . . . Yes, it's much easier now to get that license, and it hasn't proved to be that beneficial to us, has it. However, I still think that when a person becomes a ham, THAT is when they can find one of the many sub-hobbies in our amateur radio service and get excited. It's hard to start out by trying to get someone to learn all the ins and outs of communicating with satellites, for example. But once they are "in", with a license, they may discover that aspect of radio and dive in. It takes mentors, it takes clubs, and it also takes bands like 2m to be interesting and fun. Dave

 

Walking past the 'out of control crime makes 2 meters rotten' meme...

Simply put, 2M is dead owing to cheap, nearly universal cell phone coverage. Once cheap cell phones arrived, the days of the repeater-based phone patch were...over.
Much like Starlink is cutting into traffic from cheapskate sailors and the infamous WINLINK - - better, cheaper systems will always supplant ham radio bypass technology. (Don't throw stones here, please)

While the repeater-based PP were nice, they offered zero privacy and many machines had real restrictions on what traffic could be carried. Much of this was driven - at the time - by Bell systems operators screaming about toll evasion on some of the wide-area systems. This didn't help matters. This was in the mid-1970s, and those days are long gone - as is 'The Phone Company".

Locally, here in Anchorage, there is nearly zero activity outside of classic AM/PM 'drive times' and some organized nets. I carry an HT with me most times I'm out of the house. mostly from force of habit, just to monitor a couple of local repeaters. I hear -mostly dead air.
I may be missing a lot of traffic; the area is rich in both V/ and UHF machines along with a few digital relays/remote base setups.

The internet links have changed some of the traffic I've heard. One day, a KL7 - who was in Ore, was chatting with a chap from New Zealand, over one of the local repeaters. Rare but interesting. Not enough by itself to 'save' 2M.

I would note that at least one Alaska based HF net will take check-ins over either one of a pair of VHF repeaters here in town. I think that is a good step forward to bring in Techs into the 'HF scene'. And like both AK and HI based SSB nets, they are happy to take CW check-ins from the CONUS.

What can 'we' do to increase 2M traffic?
I suppose finding an activity to support - one that cannot use cell phones might be a start - all you need is folks to get up off their backsides to volunteer to provide said support.

As to the rest - cheap internet access and Smart phones have cut deeply into the pool of young folks that might have chased a ham ticket in days long past.
The FT* and other digimodes may hold some promise but are normally not found on VHF.

As far as local communications needs, you cannot ignore that the GMRS and MURS bands provide much the same ability with either a cheap license or license free operation. Another erosion of the potential ARS operator pool.

For now, I think 2m and 70cm allotment is 'safe' from being sold out from under the ARS community - for now.

As with any of these opinion posts - YMMV, don't shoot the piano player and keep your hands inside the carriage at all times....