I re-read that diatribe and think I need to clarify.
Ham is cool, but it requires some dedication and commitment to learn the basics.
I think it's fair to say all hams love helping new hams and old. I hope that's clear from the reams of digital ink we spent in threads.
What I don't think is time well spent is the same fire drill every year a month before Cruise Moab. Current hams should be the ones teaching the next generation.
I don't hold it against it anyone, it's a hobby with a long history and cliques. It's not fair to expect a member to embrace that who just wants to drive their Toyota offroad and not have to yell out the window.
This was a topic of discussion early on. How would herding cats work, keeping everyone legal and courteous? After all the Rising Sun hams are a drop in the bucket of hams around Denver and worldwide. We have to co-exist within that ecosphere.
Ham radio can be whatever you want it to be but a central tenet to the hobby is curosity and respect for other hams. But if it's not a core hobby and you're not aware of the larger picture how can you know what that means?
And to let you in on a secret, the ham community really is curious with how we use it. Field days, mobile operation, off-grid stations, APRS, etc. are topics all the time in
QST and discussion on repeater rag chews. Non-4WD hams love having you show off and talk about your stations.
Since GMRS is our club’s preferred way to communicate, it makes sense to start there.
I view FRS and GMRS differently.
FRS is intended to be as close to fire-and-forget service as really can be done with a radio. There is almost nothing you can do, the antennas are fixed, the power is fixed, the frequencies are fixed. You need to put in batteries and push talk. The technical expectation is low and I'm going to do as much as possible to help an FRS user every time. They're not asking to be a radio pro, they really just wanna talk. Repeat customers are absolutely welcome to ask the same question over and over and over.
GMRS is a licensed service but there is no test of technical understanding. The FCC therefore restricts technical aspects in such a way that most GMRS license holders can't get themselves into serious quicksand. So as long as you do your best and give call signs it's not hard to regulate. That said the service does allow grandfathered multi-type radios (e.g. GMRS/commercial/public service) and repeaters and that can get complicated, so there's a non-zero chance for charliefoxtrotery. So to me GMRS is like CB was, where I was always happy to help tune antennas and crimp new connectors and what-not.
But that tech aspect aside, I do think it's reasonable to expect a GMRS licensee to
operate with some level of
improving skill and be a good example on the air.
That is where I think the club should have always focused. Perhaps there should have been a designated communication specialist, maybe a non-voting officer, something like that. It would be the person responsible for herding the cats. Have a periodic new member and refresher class to do just want is being asked here.
It was what I tried to do with Ham & Eggs unofficially (it wasn't just ham, we'd do CBs too, this was pre-GMRS/FRS). This is where you go over what you need, how to use the comms and do basic mounts and tune-ups. Getting everyone's antennas working again after a winter of mag-chloride was always the pre-CM chaos and the more technical people are always happy to help.
I enjoy the simplicity of GMRS but I would like to get better at setting up DCS and CTSS aka “privacy tones”. I feel like privacy tones could be useful for Cruise Moab because of the amount of people using the same frequencies.
This could to be a topic by itself, but PL/Tones/CTCSS/DCS should be discouraged. They are not private (if you turn off tones on the receiver you still hear the radios transmitting with it on) and do not increase channel bandwidth and capacity.
If you turn on a tone all that does is make it so you and your group don't hear others not using the same tone. But you're still interfering with each other when you transmit at the same time. You can't hear others on the channel to know that you need to move to another. Also in an emergency you won't hear people in the clear (no tones) or using other tones.
It's only my opinon, though.
The exception is repeaters. The use of tones is important to their operation but even there it's mostly only on the input. Most ham repeaters don't put a tone on their transmitted signal. It doesn't prevent hearing it so there's no point, although some do put the same on the output as the input for courtesy. Most radios made in the past 20 or so years have a function to listen and "hear" the tone on a signal, so if you put the same tone on the output as input you have in effect advertised your unlock tone.
The input tone is used with ham repeaters mainly to cut down interference, it's helpful with close in signals or noise. Most ham repeaters share tower space with commercial radio and cell phones and all sorts of things, it's a very tough RF environment so you can't rely on a clean signal to trigger, you need a squelch plus tone to make it more reliable. In any case it's exceedingly rare for a ham repeater not to publicly list their tones, it's frowed upon to make a ham repeater closed.
GMRS repeater owners tend to use tones on both input and output, which seems to be split (input different than output) to keep their use private. You have to contact the owner and ask for the tones.
. No offense Dave.
