East
Kootenay Amateur Radio Club, Inc.
VHF
Repeater Guidelines and Good Operating Practices:
All amateur radio operators are welcome
to use the EKARC Amateur Radio
Club, Inc. 2 meter
repeaters. The rules
that govern our service require good
amateur operating practices. Our club
membership, the repeater board, and the
trustee have approved the following guidelines
and repeater operating practices.
We encourage you to follow these
guidelines when using our club’s repeaters.
This will make the use of our repeaters
more enjoyable for everyone.
Use
plain English and avoid jargon. Use plain language on a repeater.
There is no need to use slang or jargon.
FM repeater communication is
essentially as clear as a telephone call. Q-signals,
pro signs and phonetics are
not necessary for most FM operation.
Content of communications.
We are all familiar with
types of communications
which the rules prohibit, such as music, codes
and ciphers, criminal activity,
false signals, broadcasting, retransmitting radio signals, and obscenity and
indecency.
While we support freedom of speech, we need to remember that
there are many listeners of all ages who
monitor our repeaters. Our language
should be courteous and sensitive to the considerations of
all listeners, free of
expletives,and suitable for family conversations. Use language suitable
for
prime-time television, not R rated movies.
We also ask all users to avoid on-the-air
conflicts about controversial topics. If
the debate starts getting vehement, change
the subject, or continue it off-the-air.
For many years, hams have followed a
“rule of thumb” that it is not a good idea to
discuss sex, religion, and politics over the
air.
Identify
correctly. rules require a
station to identify every ten minutes
and at the end of a QSO. Repeating the other
station’s call sign and your call
sign following every transmission is not
necessary. Never transmit without
identifying.
Making contact with another station.
If the repeater is
quiet, just sign your call
or say your call followed by the word
“listening.” Anyone on the frequency will
know that you are willing to accept calls
from any other station. Nothing else is
necessary. Don’t call CQ to begin a conversation
on a repeater.
If you’re in conversation, a brief pause
before you begin each transmission
allows other stations to break in – there could
be an emergency. Don’t key your
microphone as soon as someone releases theirs. If
your exchanges are too
quick, you can prevent other stations from
getting in.
To join a conversation in progress,
transmit your call sign during the pause
between transmissions. The station that
transmits next will usually acknowledge
you. If you are in the midst of a
conversation and another station transmits his or
her call sign between transmissions, the
next station in line to transmit should
acknowledge the new station and permit the new
arrival to make a call or join in
the conversation. It is impolite not to
acknowledge new stations, or to
acknowledge them but not let them speak. The calling
station may need to use
the repeater immediately, so let him or her
make a transmission promptly. Don’t
use the word “break” to join a conversation,
unless you need to use the repeater
to help in an emergency.
Testing and signal reports.
If you are unsure how well
you are making it into
the repeater, DO NOT kerchunk
the repeater. Any time you key up the repeater,
you should identify, even if you are just
testing to see if you are making the
machine. Keying the repeater without identifying
is illegal. Do not use the
repeater as a "target" for tuning or
aiming antennas, checking your transmitter
power, etc. Use a dummy load where
appropriate, or test on a simplex
frequency. If you need someone to verify that you
are making the repeater OK,
ask for a “signal report.”
Emergencies.
To make a distress call
over a repeater, say “break, break” or
“break for
priority traffic” and then your call sign to alert all stations to stand by
while you deal with the emergency. DO NOT USE
THE WORD BREAK TO JOIN
IN A QSO UNLESS THERE IS AN EMERGENCY!
All stations should give
immediate priority to any station with emergency
traffic.
Usage. Keep transmissions on the repeater as
short as possible, so more
people can use the repeater. Be considerate of
other users, and don’t tie up the
repeater unnecessarily for long periods of time.
Don’t overuse the repeater – it is
a shared resource. The repeater is not a
soapbox. If you’ve been using the
repeater for quite a while, consider getting off
and letting others have an
opportunity to use it, or if possible, move your
conversation to a simplex
frequency.
Our repeater is considered an emergency resource and as such
requires monitoring by other home stations. Overuse and insensitive
conversations will force these monitoring stations to
turn their radios down or even off.
The best way to determine if you are able
to communicate with the other station
on simplex is to listen to the repeater
input frequency. If you can hear the other
station’s signals there, you should be able to use
simplex.
If other amateurs are asking to make
calls during a QSO, it is a very good
indication that there are other users waiting to
use the repeater. Even if there are
not other stations asking to make calls
during a QSO, or if other users are invited
to break in but chose not to, there is
still a very good possibility that there are
other users waiting for the QSO to end so they
can make a call. Many amateurs
are reluctant to interrupt an ongoing QSO to
make a call; they may feel that the
call they want to make is no more important
than the QSO already in progress.
Being a wide-coverage system, many mobile
stations and travelers use the
system to communicate over a wide distance
while on the road. The VE7CAP
repeaters have been built at considerable expense
and hard work to provide this
wide-area service. One of the purposes of our
repeaters is to expand the range
of mobile and hand-held transceivers.
VE7CAP is NOT a closed repeater system. It is an
open, user-friendly and
visitorfriendly and very wide coverage system. Local and
visiting amateurs who
are not members of the East Kootenay ARC are welcome to use our repeaters.
Those who use our repeaters frequently
are encouraged to consider joining our
club or making a donation to help support our
repeaters.
Shutdowns.
A control operator may
shut off the repeater either due to a violation
of the VE7CAP repeater policies, violations
of Industry
flagrant disregard for "good amateur
practice". A shutdown should be taken as a
hint that something was wrong, either with
the conversation or with the operating
practices. Shutdowns are often done in lieu of
direct personal intervention by a
control operator as it avoids the situation from
becoming a personal
confrontation.
If you have any questions about the East Kootenay Amateur Radio Club, Inc.
repeaters, feel free to contact any member of the
repeater board or Joe Reiberger,
VE7CLJ, the President of the club.