Site Updates

[DONE]

Have a couple things cooking in Johnstown at the site.

First is we acquired 12 matching equipment racks for the site.  For those that have seen the pictures of the hodge podge of equipment racks I currently have this is a MAJOR upgrade.

So for those needing an equipment rack or 6, I have plenty that need new homes.   Of course as equipment is moved from rack to rack it will be down.  So if you are experiencing an outage, it's only temporary. 

I reprogrammed the Johnstown625 machine tonight.  It's now the Johnstown600 machine.  I found out that I was stomping on a guy two towns over and I first and foremost do NOT want to interfere with anyone else.  He has been licensed since the FCC actually granted you repeater pairs you were allowed to use.  625 was one of his pairs and he was established so I vacated. 

Another interesting discovery while doing the retune.  I have an SWR of 5:1 on the transmit antenna currently.  Gonna rig the tower this weekend and hopefully get new line run and a different antenna in place on the tower.  It has seemed to be a bit noisy at times and I really wasn't paying close attention.  That of course is going to change.   I will be putting a power monitor on the antenna system so I know when there is a problem going forward. 

I also figured out I have a 10dB loss in the transmit combiner.  That works out to 50 watts in and 6 watts out to the antenna.  It's actually sort of funny that the thing talks 40 miles in most directions with that sort of power output.  I am giving some consideration to trying to space the antennas horizontally apart far enough at the top of the tower (needs to be 30 feet I think) so the coverage will more or less overlap.  Not sure if I can do that and not shadow the antenna's due to the horns still being on the tower. 

 

[wayoverthere]

50 minutes ago, WRKC935 said:

Not sure if I can do that and not shadow the antenna's due to the horns still being on the tower. 

 

Apologies for the off-topic, but is that an ex 'long lines' site?

[DONE]

7 hours ago, wayoverthere said:

Apologies for the off-topic, but is that an ex 'long lines' site?

yes it is

 

[wayoverthere]

4 hours ago, WRKC935 said:

yes it is

 

Very cool

[DONE]

Old racks and the new ones.

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[DONE]

Got the last of the racks cleared tonight.  The last two are sitting at the door at the site to be taken outside and around back for storage. 

I ended up moving some stuff around as there was a request by the site owner to setup a specific rack for receivers (scanners).  We have a 24 port receive multicoupler that was tested from 50Mhz to 1Ghz.  It's got a small amount of attenuation below 100Mhz, but nothing bad, around -1dB.  This will go in the top of the rack and allow up to 24 receivers within that frequency range to be connected.   Which is a plus for me since I have a number of scanners that I feed into dual receive cards on the console system for monitoring of various things.  With basically ALL public safety in my state being on one system (OHIO MARCS) I have to have multiple P25 trunking scanners running to follow stuff and segregate the different services (police and fire) and locations so things don't run together.  I have 4 running currently and will be looking for one or two more at Dayton this year.  There is very little left on VHF and UHF around here outside some commercial radio and ham / gmrs.  The ham stuff is covered with either single channel radios dedicated to a specific repeater or frequency or a radio with 14 channels that are controlled via tone remote.  My simplex VHF ham radio is an MTR with an antenna relay configured as a base station with 14 frequencies.  Having that sort of option is nice.