Repeater

7 December was apparently Skywarn Recognition Day, so a station in Mount Holly, NJ, WX2PHI, was celebrating by making contacts on the N3KZ repeater system, so at 5:15pm EST, I keyed up my HT to the mobile antenna on my car and reported 32F and clear sky. It was good to know I could key up the N3KZ node in York from over here in Lancaster.

I visited the K3IR tower site for their Elmer Night. People were configuring cameras and testing an ultra-portable FT8 setup:

• truSDX radio
• ft8cn on a phone
• very lightweight wire antenna and transformer kit
• an inexpensive, but super-long, fishing pole as a mast

(Now I need one of those fishing poles.)

I borrowed a soldering iron and started on my own project: assembling a couple common mode chokes from a short piece of RG174. It got dark quick, so I finished the chokes at home. It was my first time trying to crimp those SMA connectors.

I got a quick tour of all the repeater hardware. There are a lot more services running on these towers than I realized.

I’m listening to the April Tower Drill of Lancaster ARES. They seem to be roving around the county and contacting each of the repeaters to log a signal report at higher and lower power levels, especially down to HTs.

From the ARES page, I discovered a new repeater to add to my scan list: W3AD at 145.39 PL 118.8.

I tuned to the ISS Repeater on 437.8Mhz as it went overhead (according to gpredict). I couldn’t hear anything really, but I saw a signal sweeping in and out (doppler shift) as it would have been crossing over head.