NYSPTEN

GUIDELINES FOR NET CONTROL STATIONS

While the net provides fellowship for all, its primary function is to facilitate the passing of traffic. To do this professionally it is essential that the net control station run the net efficiently. The following guidelines and comments should be helpful in the pursuit of our primary function.

1. Follow the preamble

2. Avoid redundancies and ramblings

3. Try to call for additional stations, with or without traffic at least every 5 minutes encouraging non members to also check-in.

4. Try to use as few words as possible to accomplish your NCS job; no one is perfect or expected to be, but we can try.

5. Expect stations to follow standard traffic handling procedures.

6. Be polite-do not criticize anyone on the net on how they behave as net members; it’s unproductive. You should however comment to stations if they do not follow the preamble-just be positive in doing it.

7. If conditions are rough (poor propagation, qrm, etc), encourage another station (especially one that is on the other end of the state) to call for additonal stations.  Hopefully some marginal signal stations can be heard.

8. Try to run the net at minium of 10+ minutes; 20-25 minutes is even better.  We find that the check-in counts go up when the net is active for at least 20 minutes or so.

No net control station is expected to become a robot unable to let his or her personality shine through. We all approach things differently, but we can do so and still run a very efficient net.

Alternate Net Controls:

Anyone may be an alternate net control.  Unless you know ahead of time that a regular net control will not be available, WAIT 1-2 minutes before assuming the net control function.  Not everyone's clock is set exactly to WWV or time.gov.  Try to follow the net control script provided on this website.

Deliberate Interference:

On the rare occassions, deliberate interfenece has occurred.  The best way to handle is to invite the station to check-in and if they continue, ask once for their callsign and then procede to totally ignore the interfering station. 

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