Stadium Remote is ON THE AIR

Ken KC5OU has refurbished the Stadium Remote and it is back in service atop the OU Football Stadium press box.

A new channel element was installed moving the input to 147.660, the same as the main receiver. To use the Stadium Remote, please use tone 100.0.

Consider the next few weeks as a "test" to make sure that all is well.

More power!

OK, not really. In fact, you'll probably need less power to reach the VHF repeater.

Thanks to Ken KC5OU, the receiver section of the repeater was recently re-aligned.

The increase in sensitivity was on the order of 25 dB thanks to adjusting some components that had changed value over time.

We've had some good reports from KE5DVB in Newalla and KD5RAK on his HT in far west Norman.

Programming your radio

(Part of this was in a post a while back, but it's worth repeating)



Your HT, mobile, or home station should have the following channels programmed into memory slots:

• 147.0600 +600 kHz offset, transmit tone 141.3 Hz
• 147.0600 -600 kHz offset, transmit tone 141.3 Hz
• 147.0600 simplex, transmit tone 141.3 Hz

Following this pattern allows switching between repeater receivers with a minimum of hassles.

The repeater also transmits passes the 141.3 Hz tone, but whether you include that as a receive tone in your configuration is up to you.

If you can set channels to be "skipped" or "locked out" on scan, you should consider doing that for the 2nd and 3rd channels above as they all carry the same audio.

Why the simplex version? Should the repeater go down completely, you will be able to talk to folks on the repeater's output frequency. This will alert others to the fact that the system is down since they may be able to hear you.

For UHF:

• 443.7000 +5 MHz offset, transmit tone 141.3 Hz
• 443.7000 simplex, transmit tone 141.3 Hz

Again, lockout, or skip, the simplex version so that you don't end up scanning what are, essentially, duplicate channels.

Stadium Remote

Whenever the power cycles at the Stadium, the Stadium Remote resets. That's why we've been hearing AC6GT's Echolink node coming through the repeater.

We are working on gaining reliable access to the Stadium in order to visit with the equipment which is surely lonely not having been touched in several years. If we can repair the CTCSS tone board, that should end the interference issues with AC6GT.

Interesting band plan

ORSI (see link over to the right) is Oklahoma's repeater coordinator. They haven't seen fit to become a spectrum manager like many other coordinators. TASMA, the group that coordinates the 2-m band in Southern California, sure has though. Look at their bandplan: http://www.tasma.org/bandplan.pdf.

There is no need to worry about where you can set your dual-band rig to be a cross-band repeater or where to put your IRLP node - it's all laid out beforehand to prevent interference (though surely there is still some).

Stadium Remote

SCARS holds a coordination on the 147.0600/147.6600 pair. We do not hold a coordination for 146.46. AC6GT has put up an IRLP or Echolink node on 146.46 in South OKC. Needless to say, this gets into the "minus input" quite well. As a result, we have disabled the Stadium Remote pending a decision on further upgrades.

The tentative plan is to complete the main repeater upgrade and then devote some time to the remote. Current thinking is to replace the channel element on it's VHF receiver with one crystalled for 147.66 and to switch to a different CTCSS tone. This would mean that in the future, you would switch tones instead of switching inputs when using the "in-town".

Another option is to acquire a voter and then use the voter to repeat the best signal it hears, regardless of which receiver is in use. This would be a large expense and an even larger expense of effort.

Repeater Update

Here is the PDF of the presentation from the August meeting.