147.300+ PL 88.5 HZ
TEARA's WA4UQC 147.30mhz Repeater in Wilson, NC (SK)
'Welcome to the WA4UQC repeater in Wilson, NC. PL 88.5' was the feminine voice of AC4QD
heard on this repeater every 10 minutes for over 8 years. It was
sponsored by the Triangle East Amateur Radio Association (TEARA). The
repeater is now permanently offline, but was much fun for the many years
that it was operational. This repeater was located atop the N.C.Special
care center on the NorthEast side of
Wilson, just off of Hwy 301N. The structure
is about 130 feet tall, and
the repeater/antenna occupied the penthouse area. The repeater's
primary antenna was an ANLI A-1000 fed through about 50' of 7/8" Andrews
heliax. Wilson is only about 75 feet above sea level, and we were on
one of the tallest buildings in town. The repeater room was temperature
controlled, and the repeater was powered by a full-time emergency power
circuit.
The NC Special Care Center rebuilt much of it's upstairs and penthouse
area to house loads of new electronic equipment, and all radio
operations were required to evacuate the facility to inhibit possible
interference from RF exposure.
This
picture on the right is the finished product, complete with homebrew
duplexers on top. The brown duplexers were originally VHF cavities
designed for 1.5 mhz commercial split, and were inappropriate for 2
meter amateur use. The "guts" were removed, new coupling loops and
harness built, and away they went. The 3 silver cavities (two are behind
the others) were scratch built from aluminum irrigation pipe, using
copper pipe for the stubs and copper plate for the end caps. They were
originally built as bandpass/band reject cavities from the ARRL
handbook, but were later modified for notch only to minimize losses. The
repeater was actually a telephone remoted RCA series 1000 transmitter
used by the local power and light company to control hot water heaters.
The
photo to the left is the repeater with it's cabinet open. Starting from
the bottom, there's a Motorola Micor for a UHF remote link, a 30 amp DC
supply for the remotes, power distribution panel, telephone remote
interface, RCA 1000 RX module, ARR GaAsFet RX preamp, voltage regulation
rack, exciter and force cooled PA, and a homebrew "brute force"
force-cooled 13 vdc regulator rack. The controller is a MCC RC-1000 with
customized firmware. The PA is from a 100 watt VHF GE Mastr II mobile.
Both
the link and the primary rx's are tone decode for interference control
using Selectone decoders. A pl of 88.5 is required for access, and this
pl is also re-encoded on it's output signal during COS activity for
linking purposes.
This
repeater's primary coverage area was Wilson County, and it was linked
full-time to 442.400+ KD4WJD in Zebulon, NC (about 30 miles W) and
147.39+ PL 88.5 WB4IUY in Clayton, NC (about 35 miles SSW).
This
next photo is of my oldest son, Chris KF4DBX, installing a copy of the
WA4UQC station license to the repeater cabinet. Along with several
others, Chris has spent many hours at this repeater site helping with
upgrades.
The
photo below is a shot from the 147.300's link antenna perch at about
100 feet, looking at it's link antennas awaiting signals to relay. It
was taken at nightfall looking into a beautiful NC sunset. In the daytime,
the view is quite nice from this site. The large antenna on top is
pointed to 147.39 in Clayton, while the smaller antenna below is pointed
towards Zebulon.
Here are a few more pictures of the Wilson repeater....
This picture on the right is the UHF link antenna,
pointed back towards
Zebulon. It provides a passage to the "backbone repeater on 442.400, which in turn provides a common point for
other repeaters to "link in".
The
photo to the left is the another of the repeater with it's cabinet
open. In
this
picture, Brandon (my younger son) and I were pulling a bit of
_MAJOR_ maintenance on the repeater. Over the years,
it has been hit by lightning 3 times... once destroying the controller,
once blowing a large DC Power Supply, and
lastly blowing the processor chip in the controller and the main VHF
power amplifier. Since 1993, it has had 3 power amplifiers,
and a variety of other little things replaced. The main antenna has been
destroyed twice by lightning, as well as
destroying the feedline on one ocasion. This type of maintenance isn't
abnormal, and isn't too bad considering
that it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The next photo on the right is of the repeater when is was getting an overhaul
about a year ago. It was hit by lightning in a spring storm, and received a bit of damage to the VHF power amp,
duplexers, antenna, phone patch, and controller. Steve KD4WIW, my son Brandon, and I spent a couple of days trying to
sort through the wreckage, hihi!
The photo below is a shot from the 147.300's rooftop, as seen when looking
eastward.
