Repeater outages

[OldNumber7]

The downtown repeater in Baltimore went out some time Thursday morning or midday and was still out before dawn Friday. So I called customer service and talked to a guy for whom English was evidently a second language and explained the situation. I'm not sure he understood what I was saying, but the repeater was still down ten hours later. So a full 24 hours and counting....
Thankfully these outages aren't frequent but when they happen it takes way too long for them to get fixed. Why is that? And why can't the repeaters just shut down when they fail, instead of put out dead carrier? That way we'd still get SOMETHING from the sky instead of zilch.

 

[JeeperOne]

Hi everyone:

Thankfully these outages aren't frequent but when they happen it takes way too long for them to get fixed. Why is that? And why can't the repeaters just shut down when they fail, instead of put out dead carrier? That way we'd still get SOMETHING from the sky instead of zilch.

Because it's an ELECTRONIC device just like your receiver is. When the system fails, it doesn't always take time to ensure that it does what it's designed to do because IT CAN'T.

That's just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes....

Cheers

 

[Tom Wells]

Because it is just a repeater, with no staff, monitoring or local service imperative.
To give the same level of reliability you learned to expect from radio requires an investment in people.
The satellite companies are not set up for this level of reliability.
The existance of repeaters is tacit admission that the system does not live up to the hoped-for claims of usability.