OK.....
Hope I can shed a bit of light here:
Growing up, I had an interest in severe weather. After I could drive, I started "chasing", although I didn't know that was a thing at the time. Later, I found out about Skywarn, and several of my buddies had started learning and tagging along with me. One of them was a ham, and told me there were nets and such, and although I never was a ham, and never became one, I bought a Radio Shack HTX242 so i could listen in. If reports needed to be called in, I would do it on my car phone (remember those?) or my buddy would use my mobile.
Our early participation in Skywarn was infuriating to say the least. Net control would never activate, the repeater would be off for maintenance, or you couldn't hear or give any reports because two octogenarian gasbags were tying up the repeater, talking about hernia operations and hemodialysis. We got fed up. We abandoned amateur radio, and our little team (there were 7 in the beginning) recruited about 20 more people, and formed our own Skywarn team. We bought used Motorola 800MHz gear off of ebay, some VHF Minitor pagers, and a few VHF mobiles. We leased an 800MHz trunked channel and a slot on a VHF community repeater off a local radio shop. We elected 4 officers every year, and those officers got the VHF mobiles. When NWS would request spotter activation, one of the officers would drop the tones over the VHF, and activate the team. We'd then follow pretty standard ham protocol over the 800MHz repeater, and one older man we knew would man a desk in his house, taking reports and phoning them in to NWS by landline.
It wouldn't work for everyone, but it worked for us. The team was formed in 1997, and disbanded in 2006. Most of the equipment and members went to the local REACT team. I was made the Operations Supervisor of the team in 2007, and moved here in 2008. The REACT team collapsed in 2010.
