July 17, 05 by Iroquois County Amateur Radio Club
Iroquois County Amateur Radio Club
Minutes for Month of July 6, 2005
President Steve Called Meeting to Order at 7:15pm at Red Cross office in
Watseka.
Old Business
Report of Minutes of Last Meeting were read and approved.
Report of Financial Condition of Club was read and approved.
New Business
Motion made and seconded and passed to not have any more meetings until
fall. So many members have so much going on that prevents them from
attending the summer meetings. We will open up the meetings again with the
October 2005.
Any urgent business can be brought up on the phone tree and on the
repeaters.
Three members met before the meeting at Fiesta Restaurant and had a good
meal.
We discussed again the idea of a backup power supply for the 03 machine.
Sam’s UPS was tested and was not working right. Steve has a battery that we
think will be fine. We will try to get installed soon. Will have to buy a
plastic battery box to hold the battery.
We all had a good time working on the power distribution system for the Red
Cross radio systems. We installed new wiring and installed Anderson power
pole connectors on all the radios in the office. Amateur, GMRS, and Red
Cross radios were all attended to.
Sam Sec Tres
Members present
Steve
Carl
Sam
Sam Ripple
W9QKF KAE7607
July 16, 05 by Iroquois County Amateur Radio Club
I think that the FCC data base has our Red Cross license as WQDB331. Hope we get our paper copy in a few days and will post for all to see.
The other night in the middle of a lightning storm (Lori had to wear sunglasses) the 03 repeater went off the air. It was about 1:00 in the morning and Jerry and I were talking and then we were unable to hit the repeater? What a sinking feeling!! Of course Jerry and I tried to go simplex but could not get through to one another. We could not remember what freq we were going to goto. I have talked to Jerry and others in last couple of days and we think a good plan would be to go to 146.52 or
147.03 simplex. I think that everyone has 52 in all of their HTs or base units. I still have some crystal radios but all have 52 installed. The 147.03 simplex has the advantage of knowing when the repeater is up if we use the output of the repeater.
The Red Cross dinner was last night and we got a very nice mention and round of applause for our efforts in the communication unit. Also got a very well done certificate.
Carl, Chris, and Sam accepted the honors on behalf of all of you.
Steve and I plan to work on repeater on FRi morn about 10 am to see if we can figure out a way to get the voice id to stay off and get battery back up going. Listen on repeater and help us out if we need a signal check.
I will like to get some testing done on the 47.42 freq up and down 57. Winter storms and shelters at Ashkun, Clifton,Buckley, Onarga, Gilman up and down the interstate will be here before we know it. If we can get in from mobile I assume we could set up a quick base station.
Carl has tested south on route 1 and says works well down to Milford and Hoopston.
Remember that we will NOT have a meeting in person in Aug. Meet on the air and solve problems that way.
73
Sam Ripple
W9QKF KAE7607
July 16, 05 by Iroquois County Amateur Radio Club
We have a 100 watt GE MASTR II repeater running about 80 watts into a set of DB 4060 band pass/band reject duplexer. I think we get about 58 watts to the coax. The coax is 500 feet of 7/8 inch heliax to the top of a 500 tower in Crescent City IL. The antenna is a 4 bay DB products folded dipole.
Our controller is a NHRC-3/M2 hooked to a TS-64DS Communications Specialists tone encoder decoder. This machine was setup using info from the web site www.repeater-builder.com.
This web site is the greates repeater source in the world. Kevin Custer W3KKC and Scott Zimmerman N3XCC will build one for you if you have the money and don’t mind the extra cost of labor and transportation. They are near Summerset PA.
We also have a Kenwood 850 440 meg repeater in my garage but we are hoping to get it up to about 200 feet on a cell tower. We also have a GMRS repeater up about 150 feet, its a Motorola 40 watt GM300 with internal duplexer.
The Kenwood 850 and 750 has a good sound and can be bought for about 1300 dollars.
Putting a repeater together is not cheap–coax, duplexer, antenna are costly. Of course the answer to a good repeater is a tall site. The higher the better.
Sam Ripple
W9QKF KAE7607
