We have been discussing not renewing the paid Zoom account in the after Gathering sessions over the past few months due to its cost primarily. But also we have been only using it once a week for a few hours with less participation recently on Wednesday evenings. We tossed around Google Meetings as we have a paid Workspace account and Meetings were included. But a firm decision had not been made as the the subscription expiration approached.
We just received 2 donations in support of keeping Zoom going…so we have renewed our subscription and likely will keep it in paid status for additional years. Thanks to those who stepped up and “told us” that they want to keep Zoom.
It was a good demonstration of a targeted interest and folks stepping up for something that they like. PNWD does not actively press members for support. The voluntary support for PNWDigital is still only at about 10% of our monthly operational costs. That does not include the hardware costs of adding new repeaters nor their maintenance overhead nor the costs paid by other repeater owners on the network. We suggest only $25 annually to support PNWD. If all our members did that, we would have all our monthly bills covered and funding for maintenance and 1 or 2 new repeaters and sites each year. If you wish to support our effort, please use our Donations page. You are also welcome to support your local DMR repeaters directly as well. All donations to PNWDigital are listed on the website and members may view it at any time.
2022 was a rotten year on so many levels. The DNR and HamWAN mess resulted in the loss of 3 of our repeater sites and a few other sites lost Internet. We were able to get Baw Faw back on-network (HamWAN) and have planned for 2022 to get Ariel back online and deploy a n ew wide area repeater on the East side of Washington. We will be moving old MMDVM servers and adding new MMDVM servers with commercial hosting also.
If anyone has access to wide area sites, we have the hardware. Please let us know.
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