Programming your radio (repeat)

(This has been posted this before 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 100.0 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 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.

Inching Closer

Ken B recently brought the repeater project to a place where several of us can work on it. Progress!

This is the front view. Top to bottom: Custom box housing control and link receivers; RC-210 controller; Kenwood repeater; Astron power supply.
















Close up of front: The Kenwood actually has several "channels" in it, to allow testing and to have a fallback mode should the controller fail.









Close-up of the repeater itself: Another benefit of the new location will be less dust.









Type N connectors for RF. Rear view shows lightning protection.

Blab-off timers

We had a recent event where a ham was sitting on or otherwise keying his mic unintentionally. Unfortunately, the ham's rig was tuned to the 147.06 repeater! This caused the repeater to become unusable, of course. The repeater itself will timeout if a station transmits for longer than 3 minutes.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, the unknown ham was still transmitting after the repeater reset. This went through about three cycles before the unknown ham's unidentified transmission finally ended.

Fortunately for the rest of us, this did not happen late in the afternoon of May 10.

The moral of this story is this: dig out the manual for your radio, whether hand-held, mobile, or fixed, find the section on the time-out timer, and set it. Three minutes (180 seconds) is a reasonable length of time and matches up well with our repeater's setting.