Sometimes I feel like I might be stretching myself a little thin. Between my personal life, work, and hobbies, there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all of it. One must always focus on the important things, and the other stuff will just happen when it happens. For now, I can still have the ideas in my head and on paper. I’ll just have to wait until the right time comes along to justify throwing money at the “less important” things.
Tonight, I realized (I’ve never actually looked, before) that a person can actually build a single band repeater (not a simplex repeater) without using any kind of duplexers or actual “repeater” hardware. The cost of doing this is relatively low, compared to what a person could spend on building a repeater. I still don’t exactly know the guidelines surrounding around setting this up, but I plan on looking into it over the next few weeks. I always want to stay on the legal side of things, so I need to make sure that setting up a “permanent” repeater is something I can do. Need to make sure I’m not bending any rules, at all.
I have the perfect place already picked out in my mind. The total overall cost would be about $800 to $1000. Justifying spending that much money for something that might not get used much, at all, though, is another story. I would be putting up a repeater in the 2 meter band in an area that already has a really wide coverage repeater which hardly gets used at all. There’s also a 70cm repeater in the same town that gets used even less. Because I live in a town that is in the middle of a huge rural area (35 miles from a smaller town and 100 miles from the nearest larger town), I’m not sure that another repeater would be a good idea.
Maybe the idea that I have is more of an interest in being able to actually “do it”, than that of necessity. In that case, I keep going back to the thought that I should just save the money and put it in more useful areas… like a new radio?