News and Information
June'24 Repeater Upgrades
New Voter, New AllStar!
Scroll down for the latest updates
Some months ago, the club acquired a new high-end voter to replace the fully-analog Doug-Hall unit that served us well for many many years. The new unit is considerably larger than the old, so a lot of planning had to take place to rebuild the equipment rack at the K6IS/E site.
The new voter has a lot of nice features that the old did not have. For one, network access means that we will be able to follow the voting process in real time. There is however one thing the new voter doesn't do, and that's PL decode. The Doug-Hall had separate discrete PL decoding modules in the rack, one for each input. Our plan was to eliminate this hardware duplication and use a single decoder on the output of the new voter.
This turned out to be problematic due to input levels and the new voter rolling off the low frequencies more than we expected.
We also installed a notch filter on the output of the controller, to allow the repeater to insert a clean PL on transmit. In the above image, the Notch Filter, PL decoder and the AllStar sound/control board is installed inside the controller.
The K6IS/E node number is 61464
The tear-town/rebuild of the system took us most of Fathers day, and while we got everything working again, there are several issues remaining.
- The CTCSS/PL decode does not have the sensitivity we expect. An alternate plan is being developed to put decoders in each receiver instead of in the controller.
- AllStar is online, but the port in the controller is not yet activated.
- MtVaca had a power outage, which made it difficult for us to test that channel.
- The antenna receiving Pine Hill appears to have an issue.
- Digital voice levels are far too low
We will address all these issues as soon as possible and update this post with the status.
THANK YOU Chris, N6ICW for spending Fathers Day in the noise and dust !!
JULY 7 UPDATES
Good News! Both remote receivers are back in place and operational. Chris/N6ICW did his magic to tune the 40 year old hardware perfectly and make them sound and perform as new.
The AllStar node is online and linked in to the repeater system. Please try it out! The node number is 61464. Echolink is also back online.
We are still working on improving PL sensitivity, and the remote web control system will require another update before it is back online.
The Net Control Operator web controls (net mode on/off etc) now works again.
