[Dstar] D star rent costs

[Mark Kyle]

Hi Will

Welcome to the real world of radio as it is in 2008. Financial pressures
regarding licencing of commercial frequencies which are way over anything
you are charged for amateur licencing per frequency and bandwidth put
enormous on costs to any decent repeater site let alone the govt/council
charges for rates, electricity and the myriad of other hidden charges. Most
ham radio clubs try to back onto these sites and in 90% of cases the
commercial site owners out of the goodness of their hearts and the desire to
see forward thinking and emerging new technologies prosper and also because
most ham clubs are full of keen people will really go and try to assist in
any way possible. There are of course other site owners who want every
single buck they can get because the radio industry is under huge pressure
from other comms technologies and long gone are the days when your radio
site made great profits. Most radio sites now just break even or slightly
better if it is run well.
 
Your job if you accept it is to find one of the site owners that is one of
the good guys and is appreciative of all of your efforts. But when you get
right down to it, it is the commercial operator who is subsidizing a lot of
the fixed costs. Long gone are the heydays of radio when it was all easy to
get things done and sites for free. Having to have riggers on the site now
because of OH and S issues and the chance of being sued is a big issue.
VK3KRD's response is spot on about the whys and wherefores of the matter of
forward thinking and generous commercial radio companies.

I am a commercial radio company and also a ham radio dealer so I have a foot
in both camps and if anyone tells you that you make lots of dollars out of
selling ham radio they are not telling you the real story. Yes we do make ok
money out of the commercial radios mostly but that's getting harder and
harder now as well. I am putting up a Dstar repeater up at a site I use at
the Sunshine coast and all of the costs are born by yours truly and as you
now know how much it all is to do it at a commercial site with all the
correct filtering used so you don't get killed by all the other commercial
services it starts to run out at a lot of bucks. I am extremely lucky that
the owner of the site I use is a good guy and doesn't charge me much as well
as I do things for him at the same time on his site which saves him bucks as
well. There are a few people up this neck of the woods who have made some
pretty crappy comments about "commercial operators" putting up and taking
over Dstar to sell all the Dstar radios to make all this money and they are
going to make a fortune. Well I can tell you that the costs to buy all the
gear....no its not donated or funded by poker machine grants... its all paid
for by yours truly in one way or another it would take the sale of about 500
plus dstar radios to even come anywhere close just to break even with the
equipment cost spend but now we get the running costs on a per year basis
like the ADSL connection, electricity, license fees, maintenance, lightning
strikes, insurance etc and any other incidentals on a yearly basis it
becomes a pretty big task. Does it sound like a prosperous business case to
you?

All I can offer you Will is that as a club you have many guys at your
disposal who are keen and you may need to look at some sort of fund raising
on a semi permanent basis also you need to find a sympathetic site owner, I
am not sure of the situation over there...maybe someone who owns a house up
at Kalamunda up on the range there..well I think that's how you spell it but
that would be a great site anywhere up there for Perth. Long gone are the
days of 2 antennas when sharing sites because of the radio saturation and
things like trunking and multiax you need a radio repeater no matter what
mode it is in with proper hi-spec duplexers and isolator and good feed lines
and proper antennas that don't become harmonic generators. That's the price
of playing radio now.

By the way I am hoping VK4RDS will be on air in about 4 weeks all things
going well


Just my 2 cents worth


Regards

Mark Kyle

Kyle Communications Pty Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: dstar-bounces at lists.wia.org.au [mailto:dstar-bounces at lists.wia.org.au]
On Behalf Of Will
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 9:44 AM
To: dstar at lists.wia.org.au
Subject: [Dstar] D star rent costs

Hello all,

In VK6 we are working on the D-star repeater site
and costs are of prime concern for our local
repeater club (WARG) who have taken on the
project and many of the costs involved.

Rent for the good site that has been found
for the D-star repeater, along with an analogue
repeater, is of concern.

What has happened in the rest of Australia in
terms of rent costs...?

Any info would be appreciated as we need to
know where our club sits in terms of costs.

D-star is an added cost that is above the
normal running costs of the club which has
budgeted for decades based on analogue
repeaters etc.

Will
VK6UU

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