Lets start this post with a reminder photo from last summer of Naz on a 20 ft Extension ladder installing the VO2LMC main antenna on Smokey Mountain. Take note of where the little orange box (Repeater) is located at bottom of the pole.
Fast forward to Yesterday, Sat. Jan. 20, 2024. In mid December, the controller (Raspberry Pi) for VO2LMC Allstar Node kicked the bucket, right around the same time we had a heavy rain storm & driving wind, (it even made the National news on CBC at the time). The rain destroyed all the snow on the hill, delaying the opening of the hill by over a month, and our transport and access to the site as well. Since then, we had 2 major snowfalls (50cm+ and 30cm+), the later with high winds with drifting snow. Good news for the ski hill, and we thought good news for us, until we got to the top of the hill yesterday and found this…..
Those little Microwave Yagi’s are our link to the club building (Single Yagi) and VO2KG (Dual Stacked Yagi), and were 14 feet above the ground last summer, High enough that nobody could reach them… Yea right! Now, they’re only 2 feet above the Hard Packed snow drift, aka “White Cement”. Igloo making snow, which is easier to cut with a saw than a shovel & the repeater box is 8-10 feet under it!
About an hour into the dig we had a platform leveled off and was able started digging a shaft down in the direction of the repeater.
An hour and a half into the dig we were encouraged by finding the outside corner of the repeater box about 5 ft down the hole we just dug.
Digging out a cavern big enough to access the lock & lift the lid of the box. Locked?? Really?? Like 8 feet of “White Cement” isn’t secure enough!
And finally 2 hours into the dig, Access! Side Note: The web cam in front of the box has been disabled for now.. 🙂
When we got inside, everything looked good & it only took a couple of minutes to determine that the 12v-5v DC-DC buck booster which powers the RPi4 had died. During the initial build, I had installed an AC “Wall Wart” adapter for powering the RPi4, but changed to the DC-DC power supply to provide power to the RPi4 during power outages. Thankfully, I had left the AC adapter in place, just not plugged in. A quick change of RPi power feed and VO2LMC asl node was back up & running.
Our apologies to anyone using VO2WL yesterday, VO2LMC auto connected to WL when it powered up without us realizing it, and we probably caused a lot of that very annoying Kerchunking. Sadly, one of the things I really miss from the old analog repeater controllers is a good Kerchunk filter. Does anyone out there know how to implement a Kerchunker filter in an Allstar node? Lots of searching has turned up nothing for me so far.
The node is up, (ie. the Digital side), but the RF (Local Analog side) is still Horrible and is actually much worse that it was last fall. Now, as soon as the VXR-9000 is keyed up, the de-sensing keeps the repeater keyed up until it times out or is reset by a remote power cycle of the VXR-9000. This makes the RF side of the repeater completely un-useable until a solution is found & options are being considered.
One other Very Important Note
Prior to going up to Smokey, the old VO2LMC repeater on Round Hill was checked to see if it would accept DTMF tones to disable its transmitter while we were testing the new VO2LMC ASL repeater on the same frequency of 146.760- MHz. The old VO2LMC repeater wouldn’t even key up, let alone take DTMF tones. The back door for programming the ACC RC-96 is to dial in via the phone line and configure it using the hardline DTMF tones. Trying to dial in now just results in a Busy signal. I suspect the ACC RC-96 controller has finally packed it in after 30+ years of nearly flawless service! Lets hope the new station does as well once the bugs are all squashed.
It would be interesting to know how long the old VO2LMC repeater on Round Hill has been down. The last time I used it was early October before leaving for the fall. Has anyone out there keyed up the old repeater since then? Leave a comment below with the rough time if you’ve heard the old LMC repeater in the past few months.
In the meantime, There is would be NO VHF coverage of the Lab West region with both VO2LMC repeaters down, so I’ve disconnected VO2LB from The
Canada Hub and made it the local VHF repeater for the interim. VO2LB is located at our club building, using a VO2ET DIY J-Pole on 147.390+Mhz T88.5, Tx 25W, Full Duplex, and provides fairly good VHF coverage around the twin towns of Lab. City/Wabush.
73, de VO2GO