So, You Want to Own a Repeater?

Page two

Saturday 11/20/04: We both went up with the fully functional UHF repeater (just about everything except the PA was blown and had to be replaced). The temperature at the site was somewhat warmer that the previous visits, but there was a breeze blowing. Anticipating this, we brought an electric heater, hoping it would warm the interior enough to make it easier to work. We got the repeater installed and Monty began to set the levels. No go. The repeater was working, but there was no audio at the controller. Turned out the controller main board slot for port one was bad. So we moved the repeater over to port four and, while Monty was setting the levels, I got busy on my laptop rewriting the macro file for the controller, moving port one functions to port four (as my fingers became more and more stiff from the cold). I finished up, sent the file and checked the controller functions (all working, fortunately, as my fingers were too stiff from the cold to do any more!). Then we did a final check on all the levels, unplugged the heater (which was laboring to bring the inside temperature up to 28 degrees), jumped in the truck and headed back down the hill.

The Peavine 147.06/444.800 was back on the air.

Saturday 12/18/04: Link radio on Peavine had partially died a day or two earlier. The receiver was working fine, but it would not transmit to Eagle Ridge, so once again we headed back up Peavine. Got up to the turnoff without much trouble, but thirty feet up the access road, the left front and left rear wheels dropped through a couple of feet of hard snow. So here we were, buried up to the axles and no shovel. Luckily there was a man nearby who gave us a hand digging out. Anyway, we got unstuck, parked the truck on a level and safe spot and walked into the site. The road was pretty bad with a lot of very thick ice and other fun stuff, not drivable except with a sno-cat.

Got to the site, swapped out the PA (no transmit = bad PA, right?). Well, most of the time, but not this one. Turned out the exciter was bad, but didn’t bring one with us, as it would have meant lugging a service monitor along. So, we trudged back to the truck with link radio in hand.

Monty repaired the link radio at his house and went back up Sunday (I couldn’t make it that day) and reinstalled it. It worked perfectly; I could hear it at my house, but Eagle Ridge couldn’t. So Monty drove down off Peavine, and headed to Eagle Ridge to fix the receiver on the link radio there. Now the link is better than ever.

Once again, the 147.06/444.800 repeater system is fully functional.