Speaker 1: It is twenty twenty five, and I have a repeater
Speaker 1: challenge to issue to everybody that watches this channel in
Speaker 1: all of the Ham radio community, and that is going
Speaker 1: to include me. At the beginning of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: I spoke about how I would like us to start
Speaker 1: keying up our repeaters once a day every day, just
Speaker 1: some local repeater close to you where you are, something
Speaker 1: like that, and that went pretty well for a while.
Speaker 1: I do admit that I kind of slacked off on
Speaker 1: that myself. I was towards the end of the year.
Speaker 1: I was doing it like maybe once a week, maybe
Speaker 1: once every other week, something like that. During travel times
Speaker 1: and road trips, you're not necessarily close to your home repeater,
Speaker 1: maybe you can connect via all starback to it or
Speaker 1: via yaseev DMR, depend on what your home repeater is.
Speaker 1: But for twenty twenty five, I want to continue and
Speaker 1: upgrade this initiative. I mentioned on a couple of live
Speaker 1: streams in December that I've budgeted some money for some
Speaker 1: HF Radio giveaways starting in January of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: and in order to sign up for those, I will
Speaker 1: have a different email list sign up per month, so
Speaker 1: be watching on the channel for that sign up in
Speaker 1: my email list Hamradio two dot com forward slash email
Speaker 1: dash sign up. That's the main list. I'll have separate
Speaker 1: lists for all the giveaways, but for the repeater challenge,
Speaker 1: I thought, what I might do is this. Now, you
Speaker 1: guys tell me if this is a good idea, you know,
Speaker 1: and we can change. This can change a little bit
Speaker 1: throughout the first six or eight months of the year.
Speaker 1: We'll see how it goes. At the end, I want
Speaker 1: you guys to key up your local repeaters once a day,
Speaker 1: and I want you to keep a log of it.
Speaker 1: We're Ham radio operators. We love keeping log books, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I want you to keep a log of every
Speaker 1: time you key up a local repeater, the repeater frequency,
Speaker 1: the location, city, state is fine, and if you made
Speaker 1: a contact or not, yes or no, and then if
Speaker 1: you had a conversation, just give a brief summary of
Speaker 1: what it's about. It doesn't have to be detailed. There's
Speaker 1: not like a checklist you have to do. Just give
Speaker 1: enough information that you remember the contact and you can
Speaker 1: refer back to it and it's obvious what happened during
Speaker 1: that exchange. So at the end of every month, probably
Speaker 1: on my lasts live stream of the month. I live
Speaker 1: stream at seven pm every Sunday night. Put that on
Speaker 1: your calendar seven pm Texas time, which is zero one
Speaker 1: hundred UTC. On Monday, I live stream. I do a
Speaker 1: live stream on the channel just about every week, probably
Speaker 1: on the last live stream of each month, for the
Speaker 1: first several months of twenty twenty five. And I hope
Speaker 1: this continues to go through the whole year. I am
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask for those lists. Say if anyone
Speaker 1: did this challenge, even if you just jotted it down,
Speaker 1: and if you didn't do it every day, that's okay.
Speaker 1: If you did it a couple of days a week
Speaker 1: and you jotted down you only have eight or ten
Speaker 1: entries at the end of the month, fine, no problem.
Speaker 1: Jot it down. Email me that list and at the
Speaker 1: end of that month. I spoke about budgeted funds for
Speaker 1: giveaway radios a moment ago. At the end of that month,
Speaker 1: we're gonna give away a brand new duel band VHF
Speaker 1: UHF radio. Jaz, you just released a brand new dual
Speaker 1: band radio plus two monoban two meter radios. The FtM
Speaker 1: six thousand is still a fantastic radio from Yazoo. The
Speaker 1: FtM three hundred, two hundred and five hundred are all
Speaker 1: still in production. The Icon twenty seven thirty is a
Speaker 1: great dual band radio. Kenwood's about to release a new
Speaker 1: dual hopefully tryband radio sometime at the beginning and hopefully
Speaker 1: in Q one of twenty twenty five. We'll see how
Speaker 1: that goes. So we've got several dual band VHF UHF
Speaker 1: radios that we can choose from as a giveaway, and
Speaker 1: I want to pick one of you guys every month
Speaker 1: for the first several months. We'll see how long it lasts.
Speaker 1: If I keep getting emails with log reports of repeater
Speaker 1: activity at the end of every month, someone's gonna win something, Okay.
Speaker 1: So if you're the only one. If the first month
Speaker 1: I get one hundred entries, great. If the second month
Speaker 1: I get twenty entries and the third month I only
Speaker 1: get five entries, that makes your chances a lot better
Speaker 1: if you're one of the ones submitting entries. So key
Speaker 1: up your repeater every day, your local repeater every day,
Speaker 1: whicheveryone's local to you, whichever one you like to use,
Speaker 1: whichever one you think might actually get some activity. Key
Speaker 1: up your repeater every day, make a log of it,
Speaker 1: make a note of what you did, which repeater it is.
Speaker 1: Want to do multiple repeaters, that's fine, there's no rules here.
Speaker 1: Just keep a log of what you do. Hopefully make
Speaker 1: some contacts, and we're gonna get more repeater activity going
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty five, mainly focusing on analog repeaters. Here
Speaker 1: analog repeaters to talk to people local to you. But
Speaker 1: if hey, if the repeater you like to use is
Speaker 1: a DMR or a d STAR or a system fusion repeater,
Speaker 1: that totally counts to so key up your repeater every day,
Speaker 1: start some conversations, get more activity on the repeaters. Keep
Speaker 1: a logbook entry that you will mail to me at
Speaker 1: the end. Email to me at the end of every month,
Speaker 1: and someone's gonna win a radio at least for the
Speaker 1: first two or three months, and we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1: Seventy three guys, and thanks for being part of the
Speaker 1: Ham radio community.