The Radio Trick I Totally Blanked On

 A week or so ago, I was driving home and tried to key up our county’s primary repeater. Nothing. Tried again—still nothing. That was strange. I switched over to another repeater and called the trustee. He answered and, after a quick check, confirmed that the main repeater was offline. The power supply had failed, and the backup battery had completely drained.

I offered to meet him at the site and swap in a new power supply. On the drive over, he kept calling me on the reverse frequency. I never answered because I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to get my radio into reverse while cruising down the interstate at 70 mph. If you already know where this is going, feel free to chuckle. For everyone else, here’s the important bit:

When a repeater is offline—just like ours was that day—only one operator needs to be in reverse. Everyone else can transmit on the normal repeater frequency. The operator in reverse will hear you, even if you can’t hear anyone except that one person. Simple enough… but I clearly wasn’t thinking it through in the moment.

All I really had to do was pick up the mic and talk. He was already doing the heavy lifting by operating in reverse from a high-elevation tower site. If I had switched to reverse, he wouldn’t have heard a thing I said. Lesson learned!