[GVARC] W6GGF/R (100 Hz PL required now) became operational at 10 am Sunday 9/22/2002.

[Frank Fahrlander]

Hi GVARC members,

The W6GGF/R began operating at about 10 am this morning.

The long time use of Jack Poulsen's call, K6THR, is now over for the GVARC
repeater. I know all the members want to pass along a grateful thank you to
you, Jack, for being the trustee for the many years K6THR/R was active. Jack
also quite a bit of help along with Carol Byers, W9HGI, in the early days of
K6THR/R.  It has served us well.  Jack, by the way, provided the AC power
supplies we are using in both the primary and the backup repeater shelves.

Thanks to all those folks who helped make the new controller a reality. Two
folks deserve special recognition.

Brian Woodson, KE6SVX, encouraged us to get the new controller, did the
physical re-building of the shelf, did much of the wiring and did the
original programming.  This was truly the major contribution to the
repeater.  Thank you Brian.

Woody Woodruff, W6MUG, installed the PL module in the repeater receiver.
Thank you Woody.

Thanks to all you other folks who helped as well. The repeater effort was a
long time coming.  One of the reasons I suppose is that we had such little
pressure since the backup repeater shelf has worked flawlessly since it was
first programmed in 1995. Boy how time flies!

Here is the status of W6GGF/R:

  1. The auto patch and time of day codes are the same as they were with the
K6THR/R codes.
  2. The special 3 digit emergency dial codes are the same as well.
  3. We have some new announcements along with the old ones.
  4. One announcement gives the "battery voltage."
  5. One announcement gives the controller temperature.

I noticed the controller temperature got up to 112 degrees today. I think
when I heard that report it was about 95 degrees outside.  The new
controller draws about 1.7 amps at 12 volts.  So it will get warm in the
container during the hot part of the day.  We have talked about having
specific control over the DVR and the modem to save energy if we happen to
loose our AC power.  We might also shut these off when it gets too hot.
There are so many neat things we can do.  My list of to dos for the
controller  has 27 items so far and it just keeps growing.

We do have 2 little problems, however.....

1. The controller's Digital Voice Recorder is not useable because of an
unacceptable high distortion on the audio signal.  I noticed this late in
the schedule and did not have time to diagnose it.  We are thinking the
distortion may somehow be caused by the modem because this is the only
significant change we made since the DVR was last know to work well.

2. The auto patch, while it is useable, has similar distortion on it as
well. I will be going to the repeater next weekend and will see if the modem
is somehow causing these problems.  I bought another modem we can use,
actually but I also want to build and test the use of a better cable from
the controller to the modem.

Thanks to Thom, Tony and Woody who are helping me as control operators for
W6GGF/R.  If anyone hears something strange on the repeater or witnesses
misuse of any kind let one of us know.

   73, for now.  Frank