Repeater Committee Updates

Here’s an update on the progress of several projects in the works by the SEMARA Repeater Committee during the month of January.

224.800 Repeater & APRS Station

We received our brand new TX RX duplexer a few weeks ago (pictured above).  They are tuned and ready to be installed.  I also have donated to SEMARA a 7 foot tall 19″ rack cabinet (pictured to the right).  This rack unit formerly housed the now defunct 443.800 repeater system.  I recently transported the rack from storage at my home to the repeater site, where it was then assembled and touched up with black paint.

After the purchase of the duplexer, the remaining money allocated to this project has been used to purchase a rack mountable SEC dual power supply and a Communications Specialists TS-64 CTCSS board.  The power supply will be used to power the repeater and APRS station, while the CTCSS board will provide PL encode/decode for the repeater.  Further work on this project will continue in the next few months as we now shift our priority to working on our existing 2m and 900 MHz repeaters and the underground cabling.

Underground Wiring Prep Work

When a lightning strike in September caused damage to SEMARA equipment, a wooden board on the repeater site wall that is used to interface Ethernet and phone lines was burned.  Everything was removed from this board and it was recently given a fresh coat of gray paint (pictured to the left).  When I went back to the site a few days later, the burn marks were still showing, so I applied a second coat of paint.

Finally, I spent a good two or three hours at the SEMARA clubhouse cleaning up a wiring mess in the electrical closet (cleaned up closet pictured to the right).  A ton of unused wiring, old wiring to the long gone Quonset hut and outdated circuits have been removed.

The area to the left of the “12 Volt Distribution” box was a repeater interface box.  It contained relays for now unused alarms to the 2m meter repeater.  I have taken it home and re-worked it to now be the housing for the underground cable interface to the repeater site.  Inside will now be a CAT-5/6 breakout board with PolyPhasers (lightning protection) for two network sub-nets (IRLP for repeaters, APRS and scanner feed) and the club phone line (2m autopatch).

Thanks,

Richard J. Cabral, W1RJC
SEMARA Repeater Committee