Repeater Upgrades

The decision was made in the fall of 2021 to upgrade our 3 repeaters, VO2WL, VO2LMC & VO2KG with a more modern system, AllstarLink, as was demonstrated over the previous year by VO2ET (Darryl) with his VO2ETC allstar node.

This was prompted by small issues with VO2LMC, which is in a private building and very difficult to access. Smokey Mountain Ski Club was approached in September, 2021, and generously offered us access to AC power at the top of the new Chair lift as well as access to a light tower to mount the antenna on. We have to provide our own enclosure/shack near the base of the light tower. During some work on the Chair Lift last fall, and while an excavator was at the top of the mountain, a Seal-tite conduit was buried under the access road behind the operators shack where the 120V AC power will be fed from to VO2LMC which will be aprox. 75m further up the hill towards the highest lighting tower. It was considered to use the power already fed to the lighting tower, but it uses 600V AC, and is not on power at all times. Power from the Operators shack is on at all times except during maintenance of the Chair Lift.

VO2WL is currently very near completion on the test bench in VO2GO’s garage. We’re basically just waiting on a good day to do the tower work at the club building. Attempts were made to connect the old analog VO2LMC into VO2WL, but the ID messages, announcements & CW ID’s were not able to be turned off on VO2LMC. One of the issues with the old… Very Old… RC-96 controller is it doesn’t seem to understand DTMF control commands. It hears the tones, but doesn’t carry out the commands. This issue was a showstopper for linking VO2WL to VO2LMC, and it was only to be an interim solution until the new VO2LMC goes on top of Smokey Mountain.

At the February club meeting, it was decided to utilize the equipment already built to revive VO2LB as a VHF Allstar node repeater located at the club building, which would be connected to other networks such as The Canada Hub, HubnetUK, FreeSTAR UK, etc., for connecting to nets, and with the primary connection being to The Canada Hub.

Stay tuned for future updates.