Wayne Estes wrote:
I'm amused at your presumption that all hams have a mobile ham radio and spend a great deal of time in their car.
Wayne Estes W9AE Oakland, Oregon, USA, CN83ik
This may be somewhat true information from Wayne...
The manufacturers pushing lots and lots of cheap HT's has made our repeater association consider ideas for beefing up receiver coverage (voting) because lots and lots of hams don't "get it" anymore that 5W from 20+ miles away just isn't much signal left on VHF/UHF/etc... and they also see the glossy ads of people talking long distances, etc... and want the HT to act like their cellphone.
So right now, the project is ... find a way to do all of this voting digitally...
Analog voters and links are a HUGE pain. We're busy with some other things right now, but perhaps the techies will get some "tinker time" with some of our ideas this summer...
I only shared, because it relates to Wayne's comments. If I had to guess, I'd say the most active *repeater* users (those we're targeting to try out FM birds) right now, ALL start with HT's... and take a while to "upgrade" to permanently-installed high-power mobiles.
If the repeater groups naturally gravitate toward "solutions" for the HT users... the AMSAT folks will also see less and less folks with high-power FM rigs... (that's where my rambling comment really leads here...)
Nate WY0X