I've had my ticket for a while August '11 ( I was 17) and haven't been on much. Most of the LIDs have made this hard to enjoy, although I am very excited for C4FM and DMR. I think the main problem today is younger people will only go in with their friends for something like this. That way they have people to learn together with and talk to once they get their ticket.
In my experience, I was on a lot of repeaters but gradually got ran off for asking questions about RFI.
I.E. We have a repeater that shared a site with one of the high power FM broadcast stations in our area. You could hear subtle music bleeding through into the 2M repeater. I asked if the repeater owner knew this was happening, big mistake. I got chewed by another ham saying, "That's how it is and there isn't any fixing it so stop complaining."
Just asking a question.
I've owned repeaters for over 30 years, so my answer is from the perspective of a repeater owner. There are many kinds of repeaters. A crafty ham can make one out of materials fished out of dumpsters, but that's getting very difficult considering narrowbanding deadlined most of the usable radios, and crystal manufacturers have dwindled down to one (International Crystal). Off-the-shelf and commercial/public safety surplus repeaters can cost in 4 or 5 digits. That comes out of the owner's pocket. You can use a $150 ham grade antenna, and the repeater will work great for a couple of months, but coverage will eventually deteriorate. A "good" antenna costs between $700 - $1,500. You can use LMR400, but that will be problematic for a number of reasons. "Good" cable now goes from $2.50 - $8/foot depending on the characteristics needed. Sadly, many hams will spend more money on a talking controller than they would on any other part of the repeater.
The important thing to keep in mind are these (and I have to be brutally honest):
1) For an individually-owned repeater, you are the owner's GUEST. If you use the repeater, and he or she allows you to, that's great. That's probably why he or she put the repeater up. But someone out-of-pocketed for the repeater, as good or as crappy as it may be. When someone tells me something about my repeater, I already know it, I might get to it if I have time, or I might tell them, "It is what it is..." and invite them to go elsewhere, especially if they are not prepared to help solve whatever the issue is, by either offering up money, materials, or expertise. I don't like being that way, but I also won't be told what to do if it's all my money on the table. That kind of a repeater is run as a benevolent autocracy.
2) For a club-owned repeater, know that "the guy who takes care of the repeater" is usually elected into the position and may not necessarily be the most competent to take care of it. For example, a local club bought a Kenwood commercial repeater that went on 2 meters. It "needed" a talking controller because of scheduling functions, so the club bought one. No problem so far. When the controller was wired into the Kenwood repeater, you can key the repeater in carrier squelch and the beeps and boops of the controller come through, but the audio is muted unless you have the right CTCSS. It was an absolute monkey job of interfacing. The club has a guy who's worked in land mobile radio for 36 years, and has worked on some of these Kenwood repeaters for various fire and police departments, but he's not the guy who was appointed to fix the repeater or a member of that guy's posse, hence the repeater is someone's science project because of club politics. In my opinion, that kind of repeater is run like a congress of baboons.
I don't think I know you personally, but considering your intent to want to learn, I might actually take someone like you up on their offer to help work on the repeater. RF stuff is a dying specialty, thanks to many agencies and businesses posturing to leave land mobile radio and go to cellular-based systems. Many of us in radio come in two flavors: gray (hair... or bald) and dead. I and others would value the opportunity to pass along the body of knowledge. But in my warped world view, that's a sensei - student relationship. That's how I learned about working on repeaters when I was 15 - I got appointed to my old-school club's "technical committee" (the entire leadership of that club have passed on by now) and built VHF Engineering and Hamtronics strips for the club. Most of the repeaters that club used were hand-assembled from parts.
I used to talk to another kid who was around my age back in the late 70s. The two of us were separated by a river, but we were both riding to riding to different high schools on a bus in the mornings and talking to each other on brick-sized 2 meter HTs. The irony is that four decades later, we still get together with our families and are still involved in repeaters. He's actually very big into DMR (including its ham radio politics). I'm not so much, but I have some stuff to mess with it.
