Sunday, September 1, 2013

Repeater etiquette - roundtable discussions

A few of us were having a conversation on the repeater the other day and several people had joined in with information to add to the topic. To make a long story short, lets just say things got confusing. This happens frequently enough and one of the guys mentioned that maybe I should put a mention of proper round table "hand-off" techniques on this blog and I agreed. I am quite often guilty of this myself and was glad that someone mentioned that we could do this better. Many people already do this quite well, but we all can always use a reminder. So here is a "general" set of guidelines that I found online please give them a read:

Roundtables and "Turning it Over": When more than two amateurs are in a QSO, it is
often referred to as a "roundtable" discussion. Such a QSO usually goes in order from
amateur A to amateur B to amateur C and eventually back to amateur A again to
complete the roundtable. To keep everyone on the same page, when any one amateur is
done making a transmission, they "turn it over" to the next station in sequence (or out of
sequence, if so desired). Without turning it over to a particular station when there are
multiple stations in the QSO, nobody knows who is supposed to go next, and there ends
up either being dead silence or several stations talking at once. At the end of a
transmission, turn it over to the next station by naming them or giving their callsign, such
as "...and that's that. Go ahead Joe." or "....and that's that. Go ahead XYZ." If it's been
close to 10 minutes, it's a good time to identify at the same time as well, such as "...and
that's that. N3XYZ, go ahead Joe." The bottomline here is be sure to identify who the next
person in rotation should be.