The KE4COL 145.230(-) Gold Hill / Auburn, AL repeater is back to running on a Harris Mastr III machine. I spent Saturday, 2/9/19 reconfiguring, reprogramming, and realigning this machine for Lee (KE4COL) and he transported it to the repeater site and fired it up on Sunday, 2/10/19. There were a few audio drive/distortion issues on […]
Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon… wait, we aren’t in Lake Wobegon, are we? Nope. And there is quite a lot going on around here lately. The tower replacement in Auburn is progressing nicely: they’re stackin’ it high so the signals can fly. While those guys are going up… up… up… I’ve […]
After about a year of helping a client with our part of the planning, preparations, and procurement of antennas, feedlines, hardware, etc. for the “Swap and Drop” replacement of the approximately 450′ Auburn communications tower, it’s about to start going up. The tower sections were delivered this morning, but due to rain in the forecast […]
Now that it has been running so well for almost three months, I made the decision to keep what was built as a “temporary” repeater for the 442.175 DMR machine as the “permanent” machine. It’s doing its thing at about 93 Watts with no problems noted, so — as they say — “If it ain’t […]
Several significant upgrades and enhancements have been made to the East Alabama SKYWARN / KK4ICE Weather Station over the past several days, including the construction and installation of a Stevenson Screen enclosure which increases the accuracy of temperature and humidity readings, and replacement of every sensor/instrument in the system with new ones. The system has […]
I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to do so due to increased physical limitations lately, but with some assistance from a wonderful friend (“Thank you, KD4BO”) I was able to put the temporary replacement DMR repeater setup online at the Gold Hill, AL site yesterday (July 24, 2018.) This is an interesting repeater setup […]
Last Friday, we pulled KE4COL’s Mastr II 2-Meter repeater out of service due to some intermittent “crashes” on COS drops, strange noises, etc. which had been occurring for a while. I brought it here to the lab and finally got around to going through it today. I found and addressed a few issues and it […]
The Gold Hill, AL 442.175 MHz DMR Repeater got a few additions and performance improvements today. For starters, I added a combination of an EMR 5-Cavity UHF Preselector and an EMR Preamplifier to the receiver side of things. By doing so, I boosted the receive sensitivity of the repeater by 14.57 dB and at the […]
I’m very much looking forward to watching this tower go up. Plans are for the erection to take place in the next couple of months. What will be equally fun to observe is the dismantling of the old tower which this one is replacing. A lot of work has gone into the planning of the […]
The Gold Hill, AL 442.175(+) KK4ICE DMR Repeater went back online a little around sunrise on Saturday, June 9th, 2018. Following replacement of the burned-out MOSFET power amplifier chip, the repeater was reinstalled with an external power amplifier connected in order to decrease the load on (and the heat inside) the DR-1X repeater’s transmitter radio. […]