![\"2015-08-14_ARRL_Affiliation_Letter\"](\"http:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/2015-08-14_ARRL_Affiliation_Letter-178x200.png\")
<\/a>In January 2015, I gained approval and a 50 year Lease at $1 per month} for a commercial communication site that provided us with a fantastic location and in March of 2015 the 147.120 Repeater came on the air, providing fantastic coverage through out Bexar County, up to Pipe Creek\/Lake View, out to New Braunfels and well south of Bexar County and out towards Hondo.<\/p>\nIn August 2015, The Hamster Weak Signal Group became an official affiliated club with the ARRL, despite being an “Unclub”. This helped us obtain more affordable liability insurance that was required\u00a0 by some commercial\u00a0tower sites.<\/p>\n
Fast Forward To\u00a0January 2016…<\/h3>\n
I am happy to announce that our plans for the repeater linking Bandera, Tarpley, Medina, Kerrville, etc., is now moving forward at a fast pace\u2026\u2026We are just days away from working out the agreement on the locations and hope to have all of those\u00a0detailed\u00a0finalized by the end of this week or first part of next week.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If we are\u00a0successful\u00a0in securing this desire site in Pipe Creek, I am very pleased to say that this repeater could very well become the premier Repeater for Central Texas, providing coverage not experienced since the days of the original 147.140 Repeater in Sattler Texas.<\/p>\n
We are working with a fantastic and eager group of HAMs up in the Pipe Creek\/Bandera area on this project and the\u00a0enthusiasm\u00a0and energy up there is as high as ours to get this project completed and on the air.<\/p>\n
I have the Repeater, Duplexers, and\u00a0feed line as well as the Antenna and we are ready to begin putting up the repeater once we have locked in the agreement on the new site.<\/p>\n
It is my hope\u00a0that\u00a0DEPENDING UPON Weather, we are able to be online by the end of January or the first part of February so within weeks we hope to be fully operational. Then we will begin working to finalize our final Repeater for the Alice Texas Area which will provide the final link for us in that region.<\/p>\n
Info Regarding Noise Levels On The Current\u00a0147.20 Repeater<\/h3>\n
As many of you are aware, at the commercial site for the 147.120 Repeater we have been experiencing a constant S4 to S5 noise level from other communication gear on the site.\u00a0 We have made multiple attempts to filter out the interference to no avail, so this repeater is forced to operate with the squelch set very high limiting the repeaters ability to hear in the fringe areas. We have continued to work with not only the engineers on site to resolve this, but with our own experiments, and test as well.<\/p>\n
We have noticed that the\u00a0interfering\u00a0harmonics drop by 2dB on the lower portion of the 2 meter band and with some new Duplexers that have demonstrated 18dB greater rejection over the existing set.\u00a0 We are going to perform some test later this week, in an attempt to see if by swapping out the sharper duplexers ,and dropping the frequency down to our assigned pair for Pipe Creek, if we can not solve the input problem once and for all.<\/p>\n
So we are asking everyone please program in to your radio’s ASAP the following frequency:\u00a0 145.350 Negative Off Set with a PL tone of 82.5.<\/p>\n
If changing our\u00a0repeater pair from 147.120 moves us out of the interference we are\u00a0absorbing\u00a0now, then the repeater in North West Bexar County will change from 147.120 to 145.350. Retain the 147.120 Repeater pair in your radio, as this will then be the pair that\u00a0gets installed at the new\u00a0Pipe Creek repeater location.<\/p>\n
I will keep you informed of the final pair locations. But if the 147.120 Repeater stops responding Thursday afternoon or Friday, then please switch over to the 145.350 pair as the repeater site will then be functional on that pair.<\/p>\n
Greg N5XO<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For everyone that I have not had a chance to talk to this year so far, I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a very safe and happy New Year and that the new year brings good things for everyone. Four Years Ago… The Unclub put up our first repeater January 2012 at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8390,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,764,28,780,785],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8390"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7531"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7536,"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531\/revisions\/7536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"WeakSignal_Hamsters_Group\"](\"http:\/\/sanantoniohams.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/WeakSignal_Hamsters_Group.jpg\")
<\/a>The Unclub put up our first repeater January 2012 at the San Antonio American Red Cross on 443.025 with a PL tone of 82.5, taking the knowledge we had gained over the years developing premier VHF\/UHF Simplex stations to operate DX and applying it to our repeater, we developed a repeater that had impressive range on 70cm opening a communication link covering most of Bexar County and fantastic coverage East well past Seguin out IH 10 and strong coverage on 37 heading towards Corpus Christi.<\/p>\n