Congratulations on the good work, by the way.
Not sure why you refer to this as a pointless project. Thousands of PTTs across a wide area are made during snow events, following hurricanes, and to a lesser, more localized extent, other weather events. This does require an appropriate low band antenna. Stubbys and small antennas on handheld scanners will yield almost no signals. Without a proper low band antenna that is respectful of the needs of 47 MHz the listener will be totally blind (deaf, more appropriately).
There is not much activity on these frequencies during good weather in the summer, but following storms or heavy rains there will be voice traffic due to trees down, roads flooding, deploying and recovering high water signs, etc.
47.30 Hampton Roads is busy everyday with the Safety Service Patrol. If you are in that area, or within 30 miles of Driver, north of Suffolk, and can't hear traffic on 47.30 MHz easily, your station does not work well on low band. I suspect that is the rule rather than the exception.
As I posted during the winter, somewhere
, during one of the snowstorms I did an estimated "peg count" scanning VDOT repeater frequencies from Apple Orchard used in Bedford, to Madison, Culpeper and Warrenton, and estimated over 8 hours there were close to 20,000 transmissions. If you can't hear any of these you probably do not have a good outdoor antenna for low band, or similar, nearly as good results can be heard in a vehicle with the proper antenna.
