Community Business Repeater

[BlueDevil]

It appears that there are several UHF business band repeaters operating in my area. Several of them are positioned on hill tops which provides great coverage of my area. Upon some further review it appears that a few of these repeaters are operating in a "community" mode where the same repeater pair is being used by multiple businesses and only separated by different CTCSS/DCS tones. It looks like each of the businesses operating on the repeater pair has their own license for the frequency and location.

Is this a fairly popular way of operating a business repeater? Do businesses usually pay rent or a maintenance few to operate on a system like this? I am curious to hear if others have had any experiences with this.

 

[kd7mxi]

my understanding is repeaters etc are rented from a company and they have fcc rights they pay annualy etc

 

[nd5y]

Community repeaters were way more common until about 30 years ago when many radio shops and service providers switched most of their community repeaters into LTR trunked systems.

 

[W2MR]

I worked in two-way radio most of my life. My company had several community repeaters to cover NYC and others to cover other areas in NJ. At first you paid a monthly fee and later your were given a certain number of hours and paid more for time beyond that. You can't make a lot of money renting repeater space. You make money by selling equipment to use it. To be honest you can't make much money in the radio business (But we love it).