A new UHF repeater will be going up on HooDoo on the frequency of 444.550+ PL100 Saturday. Black Rock will be joining us on the 5th of September and Elk Butte will be linked in soon with Emita
Discussion
We finished up N7KAM, Troy's repeater from Plumpago Mountain (Priest lake) to integrate to NIRG. If all goes well it should be up and running 10/19/19. This is the first repeater which has a Kenwood link radio and preamp. All the others have Motorola link radios. The preamp is being used to make up for duplexer loss. Receiver sensitivity is 0.1uV. Transmitter output is 30 Watts off of a dipole on top of a 90 ft tower.
Goose Peak will be getting a new link radio on Sunday.
Our repeater antenna is on the post to the right of the tower. The Sheriff said he wants it moved to the new tower.
Hoodoo upgrade was postponed to hopefully this weekend.
Unfortunately we are having issues with the link receiver. So, temporarily I have it running on a full duplex link at my house then over to Blossom. It might stay that way through winter till I can fix it.
After 2 days of diagnosing the link in between Blossom and Hoodoo I cam to the conclusion we have an on frequency interference issue and it is no fault of the equipment. The beam we have up there is picking up the interference so I had to use the UHF repeaters vertical antenna which is lower gain to keep things working. Unfortunately, it has temporarily disabled the Priest Lake link. Our hops are to make it back up this weekend to get a different antenna up there.
Today I am going up to Hoodoo to figure out why the controller is not accepting commands and to repair why the link is only working in one direction on UHF. Tomorrow we are moving the antenna to a new location. The land owner have us space on our own tower. This should improve performance substantial and cut down on interference.
Hoodoo has a new controller which has been installed. The VHF repeater is working along with a new Motorola CDM1550 link radio. Audio levels dialed in amazingly. The UHF repeater went to Blossom temporarily until the finals get fixed.
What happened to hoodoo , it's back up feb4-ish ....