Repeater Upgrades

As most know, our VHF/UHF repeaters have been going through bit of a hard spell the past couple of months. After many hours of troubleshooting along side VO2NS (Naz), we found multiple issues, most having no apparent connection to each other. Severe RF interference (mostly on 10m), a misbehaving router, a couple of broken cables, at least one bad antenna, and possibly an AC Mains problem with the building feed.

The most obvious symptoms started appearing around the end of October and was most obvious to anyone connected to VO2WL or VO2LB from an external source. As long as there was no external connections, the RF side of both these repeaters operated fine… for a while, but both stations soon began to act up, even when in RF repeater only mode. It just went downhill from there, finding other problems as time went on. As anyone who’ve seen it knows, the VHF/UHF rack out in the back room is an absolute mess as bits & pieces have been piecemealed together over the years. Time for a complete rebuild of that rack!!

The first task was to repair some network cables, and change out the very old netgear switch in the rack for a ‘newer’ & more robust industrial hardened 12 port switch which was donated to the club. That happened just after new years, & there hasn’t been an issue with the network connection between the radio room and the VHF/UHF rack since then. Also, after the switch upgrade, a considerable increase in speed was noticed while remotely administering the stations.

While testing for the HF interference, it was noticed that when the HF amp is cranked up to above 800 watts, the lights in the building dim with a HF Tx, computer screens flicker, and the Raspberry Pi on the VO2WL repeater rebooted! We only seen the RPi reboot twice in about half an hour of testing, but this may signal a problem with the building power instead of RF interference. Further investigation is needed.

VO2LB was taken out of service just after Christmas & has been taking a well deserved spa break on my workbench, until yesterday, when it went back in service with a much cleaner look as 2U rack mount station and a number of new protections built in. At the same time, VO2WL repeater was removed from service for its day relaxing at the ‘Gulf Oscar Spa’ and will remain bathing in flux acid & cutting fluid for the next week or two.

“Hang On!” you may say, “I’m still connected to WL!”, Yup, that’s because VO2WL station is now an Allstar/Echolink Hub only, no local UHF repeater during the rebuild. In the meantime for the local folk, the VO2LB VHF repeater station will remain connected to VO2WL as a local RF path to the external Allstar network.

Also, our external facing dashboard, Supermon 6.1 has been upgraded to 7.4+ and will not be fully functional until the repeater software & hardware upgrades are complete.

VO2LMC remains in the same state with a bum microwave antenna on the mountain. Depending on weather conditions, the microwave signal from Smokey ranges from -71 to -82 dBm. At around -78 dBm, the link starts to oscillate, down to about -82 where it dies completely. During the oscillating period of the link, it also appears that Allstar/Asterisk starts having issues because the RF side also becomes intermittently operational. Remote access is also down at these times, making troubleshooting that much more difficult. This problem most likely will require another visit to the mountain, which won’t happen until late spring or early summer.

73, de VO2GO