[W8MWA] New ham to the area... and possibly an idea?

[Josh Prichard]

I'll be moving to the Bruceton Mills area in the next few weeks and maybe
look forward to joining this club at the next meeting.  I haven't been to
active on the radio or the local club where I live now for some time.  You
would have to blow the dust of the finals on the local repeater where I
live now as no one uses it anymore.  The club dwindled down to no one due
to problems within the club so another reason why everyone lost interest.

Is the w8mwa club a good sized club?  Don't really see many stats on
current memebers on the website. Also looking at the website I did notice a
small problem.  If you drop the www. off the front of the url and only type
in w8mwa.com it takes you to a server page and not the club website.
Should be an easy fix with whomever hosts the site.  Also I seen on a
previous topic of how hard it was to contact anyone without making email
addresses public.  There is a plugin out there for wordpress which the site
runs that may be of help.  Can contact anyone in the group but not give out
an email address.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/pta-member-directory/
If yall need help with the website I'm pretty versed in Wordpress.

Now.... I have been toying with the idea of trying to get a DMR repeater on
the air after I get moved and settled in.  DMR is a digital mode like
D-Star.  There aren't many in West Virginia and it would be the first in
the northern part of the area.  I'm looking at connecting it to the
dmr-marc network which connects to worldwide talkgroups and local
talksgroups via an internet connection at the repeater site.  Would also be
nice to get other local clubs in on this and have a regional talk group for
West Virginia or just the surrounding counties of the club for an always on
link sorta like the hamtalk system but all digital.  This would hopefully
bring more repeater activity to the area and maybe get people talking more.
You can read more here and see all of the current repeaters.....
http://www.dmr-marc.net/
Also Norcal has a stream you can listen to to get an idea of what dmr
sounds like.
http://norcaldmr.org/
Now the big question.... is there enough interest in new tech in the club
for an idea like this to get off the ground?

Josh
KC8TAI
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