I, Repeater Owner (Part 1)

Monday

Aug292011

Mon, August 29, 2011 at 12:24AM

N5FDL/R in Ripon, borrowed Vertex repeater and Telewave six-cavity duplexerI never expected, in my entire life, to have my call sign on an Amateur Radio repeater, much less two of them. And on 2-meters, too.

Yet, if I key up on 147.015 + PL 82.5, I’ll get a response in the voice of my oldest friend, Ben Harold, KG4BYN, announcing “N5FDL Repeater, Tracy!” Key up on 147.210 and I hear my callsign sent in Morse code that is actually too fast for me to copy (if I didn’t already know it was N5FDL/R being sent).

Like most everyone else, I believed the airwaves were impossibly crowded, that two meters, especially, is “full” and that repeaters were too technical for my feeble brain. At least that last statement is something close to true. The rest is mostly true, but there are still a fair number of repeaters going on the air—admittedly in out-of-the-way places—even here in Northern California.

Right now, there are 10 (12 if you could my two that aren’t yet in the list) 2-meter repeaters pending ccoordination in Northern California. And it turns out they aren’t all in such remote locations:

Pending coordinations on 144 MHz:

146.6200 KD6EKH San LuisObispo 7/6/11 New Repeater

146.6250 W6AY Oakland 10/23/10 New Repeater

146.7300 NW6C Mammoth 7/20/11 No Change

146.7750 N1PPP Kelseyville 12/10/10 New Repeater

146.8200 W6BYS Napa 7/5/11 New Repeater

146.8500 K6LNK Orinda 6/13/11 New Repeater

146.9400 KD6EKH Arroyo Grande 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3300 K7DAA Morgan Hill 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3600 K6PAC Lincoln 4/18/11 New Repeater

147.6750 WN6LOO Kelseyville 2/5/11 New Repeater

146.6250 W6AY Oakland 10/23/10 New Repeater

146.7300 NW6C Mammoth 7/20/11 No Change

146.7750 N1PPP Kelseyville 12/10/10 New Repeater

146.8200 W6BYS Napa 7/5/11 New Repeater

146.8500 K6LNK Orinda 6/13/11 New Repeater

146.9400 KD6EKH Arroyo Grande 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3300 K7DAA Morgan Hill 7/5/11 New Repeater

147.3600 K6PAC Lincoln 4/18/11 New Repeater

147.6750 WN6LOO Kelseyville 2/5/11 New Repeater

Normally, a repeater is “pending” only for 60 days, allowing other repeater owners to complain if they notice interference. When a repeater is shown to be “pending” for a longer time, especially much longer, it suggests serious interference problems have not been worked out. This makes is much less likely the new repeater will ever be coordinated.

This list is generated and emailed every Monday by NARCC, our local repeater coordination group. I won’t talk about coordination in detail here, except to say that NARCC has a very tough job.

Why me?

The reason I have these two repeaters—and somebody else doesn’t—is 100 percent because of my emergency work. If I wasn’t trying to provide needed coverage—handie-talkie coverage, especially—I would never have found out about that these pairs were available.

In my case, I happened to ask the right questions, at the right times, of the right people. I’d like to think I’d also built a reputation as a decent guy who works hard and gets things done. Do that and people share information with you, in this case, frequencies worth monitoring, plotting coverage for, and, eventually, dropping a repeater on. One of the pairs has potential for wide coverage, the other will always be pretty local. Coverage is based on non-interference with other users of the frequencies. This can be tricky and will be discussed in detail later.

One repeater’s antenna is about 25 feet up the tower at the highest elevation fire station in San Joaquin County. It uses a 3-element beam and the coverage is actually quite respectable. Though it still needs work, for reasons we’ll later discuss. Why a beam? To avoid two co-channel repeaters as well as to put more signal where we need it, and less where we don’t.

The other repeater—just installed today as I start writing this—has a 5/8-wave whip antenna mounted to a metal plate about 80 feet up a 195 foot tower at another fire station. That repeater needs either a higher gain omni or a directional antenna before it is complete, but it’s on the air and that’s what counts.

Coordination

Getting a repeater coordinated, under the policies of NARCC, our region’s coordinator is first-come, first-served operation. That means if you know of a good frequency you better keep it a closely guarded secret lest someone else put a repeater there first. That effectively means people are already have repeaters on-the-air are the best candidates for getting new repeaters on-the-air quickly when a frequency pair becomes available.

This is a bit like the seniority system, in that it seems unfair to newcomers but the longer you are around, the more you like it.

Right now, I have two repeaters on the air, new hardware coming for one of them, new hardware being rebuilt for the other, a third repeater being programmed, and a fourth maybe on the way. That means the two repeaters I am already using can be taken out of service.

The very first repeater I used is a loaner and will go back to its owner. The second was constructed from two old GE mobile radios and will become a backup unit.

With two repeaters on the air and three additional repeaters sitting in the shop, I’ll be ready if I have a failure, a friend has a failure, or a new frequency pair presents itself.

I’d love to get a new pair on top of a building in downtown Stockton to improve talkie coverage there or move my better-coverage pair to a taller location and find a low-level pair for local fill-in, if needed, near my home.

Repeater hardware is easy to come by and cheap. What is harder to get—on a budget, anyway—is the expensive and complex duplexer required by the 600 KHz. frequency split on 2-meters. Staying with the split is probably one of the biggest mistakes every made in Amateur Radio. Certainly, it created real (and forever) problems.

That will be the topic of my second post about becoming a repeater owner.

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