Weld Amateur Radio Society

- The Colorado Council of Amateur Radio Clubs stated goal:

The purpose of the Colorado Council of Amateur Radio Clubs is to coordinate Amateur Radio Club activities in the State of Colorado.

- The Weld Amateur Radio Society is a member of the CCARC and our repeaters are coordinated with the council's repeater coordinator. Each year the council holds meetings in the spring and fall at varying locations around the state.

-- CCARC website --

You will see many different opinions concerning repeater etiquette. Basically there are 3 things to remember.

• Listen before you talk
• Identify with your call sign every 10 minutes and at the end of your transmission
• Be courteous (like your mother is listening)

Here is a little more from the ARRL Repeater Directory

• Monitor the repeater to become familiar with any peculiarities in its operation and to determine if it’s in use for a special event or an emergency.
• To initiate a contact, simply indicate that you are on frequency. . . . Generally, “This is KC0KWD, monitoring” will suffice. Please don’t “ker-chunk” (key up without identifying yourself) the repeater just to see if it’s working.
• Identify legally -- you must identify at the end of a transmission or series of transmissions and at least once each 10 minutes during your communication. A few other notes from the ARRL -- After you stop transmitting, you will usually hear the unmodulated repeater carrier for a second or two. Th is squelch tail lets you know that the repeater is working.
• Don’t call CQ to initiate a conversation on a repeater. It takes longer to complete a CQ [call] than to transmit your call sign. Remember, efficient communication is the goal. You are not on HF trying to attract the attention of someone who is casually tuning across the band.
• In the FM mode, stations are either monitoring their favorite frequency or not. Except for scanner operation, there is not much tuning across the repeater bands. The courtesy tones found on some repeaters prompt users to leave a space between transmissions. The beeper sounds a second or two after each transmission to permit new stations to transmit their call signs in the intervening time. The conversation may continue only after the beeper sounds. If a station is too quick and begins transmitting before the beeper sounds, the repeater may indicate the violation, sometimes by shutting down!
• Never transmit without identifying. For example, keying your microphone to turn on the repeater without saying your station call sign is illegal. If you do not want to engage in conversation, but simply want to check if you are able to access a particular repeater, simply say “KC0KWD testing.”

- RepeaterBook is a worldwide database of repeaters. Searches can be filtered with many variables including location, band, and features (IRLP, DMR, Autopatch, etc.). Search results can be exported into a number of different formats for programming your radio, including the free and open-source Chirp software (see below).

- From the RepeaterBook site:

The site includes repeater and club information. Other topics of Ham interest include a stolen gear registry and EchoLink status database. Reasonable efforts are made to validate the data, but the quality of the information cannot be guaranteed. We depend on visitors to the site and local admins to gather and verify information.

- RepeaterBook has apps available for both Android and iPhone that will filter results based on your location and/or other preferences.

- The service and site are entirely free and the community that supports the service is all volunteer. Individual participation is encouraged in an effort to keep the database current.

-- RepeaterBook.com --

- You can program most VHF/UHF radios with the free and open-source application CHIRP.

- This software allows you to store separate repeater lists and will work with many current and obsolete radios. There is no need to have a different piece of software for different brands/models of radios. A single installation will work with all supported radios.

- A supported radio list is located on the Chirp homepage.

-- CHIRP --

- Some FM repeaters have the ability to link to other repeaters using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) technology. These systems are often open and are controlled with DTMF tones from a user's radio.

- Echolink and Allstar can also be set up without a local radio or repeater. A basic setup can be used on a computer with working sound and microphone. Echolink is the simplest to setup and use.

- From the Echolink website:

EchoLink® software allows licensed Amateur Radio stations to communicate with one another over the Internet, using streaming-audio technology. The program allows worldwide connections to be made between stations, or from computer to station, greatly enhancing Amateur Radio's communications capabilities. There are more than 200,000 validated users worldwide — in 151 of the world's 193 nations — with about 6,000 online at any given time.

-- Echolink.org --

- From the Allstar website:

AllStarLink is a network of Amateur Radio repeaters, remote base stations and hot spots accessible to each other via Voice over Internet Protocol. AllStarLink runs on a dedicated computer (including the Rasperry Pi) that you host at your home, radio site or computer center.

-- AllStar website -- AllStar Wiki page --

From the IRLP (Internet Radio Linking Project) website:

The IRLP uses Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) custom software and hardware. Coupled with the power of the Internet, IRLP will link your repeater site or simplex station to the world in a simple and cost effective way. IRLP operates a worldwide network of dedicated servers and nodes offering very stable worldwide voice communications between hundreds of towns and cities. All this with unsurpassed uptimes and the full dynamic range of telephone quality audio.

-- IRLP.net --

These are digital voice mode protocols that are all the rage now.