From: popovich@cs.columbia.edu (Steve Popovich)
Subject: Re: 430 mhz band under th (now repeater costs)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 20:13:15 GMT

> You know that many nets operate on 20 40 75 meters, they are essentially
> closed nets for the most part. Only open to the partisipants. It is rare
> that anyone jumps up and down about that.

Naturally.  A net doesn't tie up the frequency 24 hours a day, 365
days a year, so that nobody else can make effective use of the
frequency; a coordinated repeater pair allocation, however, does
prevent another repeater from going into coordinated operation on
those frequencies, aside from special PL-based sharing proposals which
generally only seem to work when the owners of the little-used
coordinated repeater are kindly disposed towards the newcomers.  When
an HF band is too full to operate on, e.g. because of a contest like
Sweepstakes, one can come back and operate there after the weekend is
over.  When a VHF or UHF repeater band's repeater pairs are full,
there's nothing you can do to regain use of the band.  You're stuck
paying big bucks for equipment that is not in common use in order to
go up to a band that is still open, or building your own, which will
probably also be very expensive, not to mention being considerably
larger and more power-hungry than commercially produced equipment.
You notice that nobody seems to be making homebrew HT's...

Economics and moral issues aside, something like what happened with 2
meters, where it's the small "closed" groups that move up to the
expensive higher bands, is much more likely to work out well than the
current situation on 440 MHz.  Most people want to be able to use an
"open" machine to talk to a lot of other people, and need to be able
to use equipment that a lot of people already have.  Likewise, if
you're running an open repeater, you want a large number of users, so
your machine has to be accessible using equipment that is commonly
available at a reasonable price.  Nowadays, that means equipment for
440 MHz or below.  Perhaps because of the restrictions on 900 MHz, it
seems to have been largely bypassed by both the users and the
equipment makers, and 1200 MHz equipment still seems to be largely a
specialty item.  So opening up a new band with "open" repeaters
doesn't seem likely to work, except perhaps for a few large repeater
clubs in major metropolitan areas that might have the financial
resources -- both group and individual -- to make the investment in
the new band, and the large user base for an open machine already
present among their club members.  But opening up a new band with
"closed" repeaters, as was done with 440, is something that would go
much more smoothly -- small repeater groups seemingly tend to consist
of people with more abundant personal resources, since after all they
are already maintaining a repeater from the contributions of only a
few people.  Besides, the "closed" repeater groups don't care that
nobody else is on the band to talk to, since they only have uses
within their group for the machine, anyway.  The problem with doing it
this way is that having established themselves, the "closed" repeater
groups feel that they have established property rights to their
frequencies, while later on as the band comes into general use, a
large number of people from the "open" side raise objections.

All of which brings us to the current state on 440...what a mess!
From: alanb@hpnmdla.sr.hp.com (Alan Bloom)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 20:42:58 GMT
Subject: Re: Baluns useless? (was: Steel Wool Balun)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Santa Rosa, CA