We have to share this one, because it’s too good not to.
Last Tuesday, just over two weeks after we made the decision to unlink, the Tucson 600 repeater, standing entirely on its own since we disabled remote modulation, posted a new all-time transmit-time record: 250 minutes, over four hours, in a single day. Not since it was part of a linked network. Standalone. By itself. A new high, in the exact configuration a lot of us worried might quietly fade into the background once the wider network connection went away.
We wouldn’t have even caught this if not for the monitoring infrastructure we’ve built out behind the scenes. Every repeater in our network reports into a real-time system powered by Zabbix that tracks utilization, connectivity, and keyup activity, along with thousands of other site and infrastructure metrics with a full year of historical data behind it for every site. It’s not something most of you ever see directly, but it’s a sophisticated monitoring system that lets us keep an eye on the overall spectrum and the health of our sites, networking equipment, and see issues before they become a problem, and ultimately – what let us catch this the moment it happened, compare it cleanly against a full year of prior data, and confirm it wasn’t a fluke or a measurement quirk. When we say “new record,” we mean it, backed by real numbers, not a gut feeling.
And this is by no means an isolated use case to one of our more popular repeaters; take a look at Pinal 675 (covering phoenix)
There’s a real irony sitting in these numbers. The whole justification for treating linking as a spectrum problem was concern about unchecked monopolization of a limited, shared resource. Disabling it here didn’t reduce spectrum use on these channels. It’s either held steady, or even increased it, to an all-time high, on repeaters that used to share that burden across a wider network and now carries all of it alone. If the actual goal was less spectrum tied up on any given machine, this is not the outcome anyone should have wanted. We’ll let the numbers speak for themselves on that one.
That’s not to say of course that the system as a whole hasn’t seen a large drop in overall traffic; our overall transmit time has in fact when we add all sites together has in fact dropped dramatically. With that said, an important realization to keep in mind on this is that the sites where spectrum is at its most premium, the metropolitan areas (Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque) where spectrum is most scarce… haven’t seen much of a reduction in congestion at all, and that is due to the fact that we’ve historically made it a point to minimize overlap between channels whenever possible in populated areas. Instead, it’s the more rural areas or outright wilderness that get the reduction, were spectrum remained readily available and where having reliable monitoring posts the most benefit from a public safety standpoint.
We don’t have a single tidy explanation for this by itself, and we’re not going to pretend we do. Maybe it’s the new weekly net giving people a reason to check in regularly. Maybe it’s people rallying around “their” local machine now that it’s standing on its own, in a way that feels a little more personal than it did as one node among many. Maybe it’s just a good week. But whatever’s driving it, the actual number speaks for itself: our most engaged local repeater right now is one that, on paper, lost a capability a lot of people were worried about losing.
To be clear about one thing: we’re not out here encouraging anyone to hold a machine down or key up longer than they otherwise would just to run up the numbers. That’s not the point of this post, and it’s not something we’d ever ask of anyone. That said, we’re also not going to pretend we’re upset about folks putting our repeaters to good use. Frankly, we’re impressed. Whatever you all are doing out there, keep doing it!
There’s a real lesson buried in here, and it’s one we didn’t expect to be writing about so soon after making this change. A linked network’s biggest strength is reach, connecting far-flung, thinly populated areas that couldn’t reliably hear each other otherwise. That’s still true, and it’s still the core of why this whole fight matters for rural coverage. But reach was never the only thing that made this community work. A repeater that people feel is genuinely theirs, with a name, a regular net, and a community that shows up for it night after night, can carry real weight all on its own.
We’ll keep watching the numbers as more of our repeaters settle into their new standalone rhythm. If Tucson 600 is any indication, trying to dial something back doesn’t always work out the way it’s supposed to.
More soon.