UK and Irish Repeaters
/GB3HE Hastings 70cm repeater back on air
The RILGES Repeater Group working party gathered on the Helenswood Academy Site, on The Ridge in Hastings, and annouced that GB3HE is now operational once again, following a small period of outage during keeper/management changes.
The repeater is currently running on a temporary transceiver and on reduced power (10W ERP). The receiver is at commercial spec and currently has no pre-amp installed during coverage initial testing and trials.
Signal reports received so far are looking very encouraging and a credit to the team who enabled the repeater to get back on air.
RILGES Repeater Group website - http://www.rilges.org.uk
New 70cms beacon GB3UHF
A new 70cms beacon GB3UHF, to be located at the same site in Kent as the 2m beacon GB3VHF, is now licenced.
Chris G0FDZ, the beacon keeper, will now apply for a site sharing agreement and once an agreement has been finalised the new beacon will appear shortly afterwards. This process may take some considerable time so an early appearance of the new beacon is unlikely.
The proposed hardware will be similar in principle to that used for GB3VHF in that the frequency will be GPS locked and the keying format will be the same as used for GB3VHF.
The antennas will use the same type of 3 element yagis (Amphenol Jaybeam 7040420) and will point in the same directions (288 and 348 degrees) as those used at 144MHz and with a similar E.R.P.
A beacon operating on 432.430 MHz will provide a very useful tool together with GB3VHF for determining propagation at both VHF and UHF over long distances from the same site
More information- http://www.gb3vhf.co.uk/GB3UHFdetails.html
North Cork Repeater
A new 70cm repeater has been added to the Southern Ireland Repeater Network in the North Cork area. The project has been completed by East Cork Amateur Radio Group.
The repeater is located near Bweeng at about 410m ASL. The repeater callsign is EI7BWR and it operates on 430.875 with a shift of +7.6 MHz (Channel RU-70) and an access tone of 103.5 Hz.
The repeater was installed on Saturday March 22nd by Neil EI3JE, John EI8JA and special thanks to Gareth EI7FZB, who braved the elements on an extremely cold day to install the antennas and cables. This brings the number of repeaters on the network to six.
Reception reports to Neil EI3JE via e-mail - neilpowell1@eircom.net or sirnrepeaters@gmail.com
New 70 MHz Repeater
All Point Radio Island Link & Friends Of Our Link are pleased to announce that the Isle of Man (GD) will shortly be host to the very first UK narrow split repeater on 70 MHz (4m) call sign GB3AF.
Our island is a very strange place, and it has been almost impossible for amateurs in the north to talk to those in the south on 4m due to the mountain range in the centre of the island, hence our need for a repeater. Our chosen location is of course the tallest mountain on the island – Snaefell.
Standing at 2036 feet above sea level, and with fantastic take off in all directions, the repeater output power will be limited to 20 watts – more than enough to have a rag chew all over the island, and probably much further afield.
Input will be on 70.025 MHz, with a CTCSS tone of 110.9 Hz the “very narrow split” is 500 Hz making it accessible for the many elusive island amateurs and those around the Irish Sea basin.
The cavity filter has been specially manufactured from a pair of locally sourced Okell’s Brewery aluminium kegs, and some very detailed and extensive evening analysis by the team was required in order to prepare the barrels for use.
Our duplexer has been specially sourced from a manufacturer in China, who luckily for us was selling on eBay. We managed to sneak this item in below the Customs barrier marked as a “Toy”, again saving us some money which has been spent on a 50m reel of RG58, some PL259’s, and a roll of insulation tape (eBay special).
The antenna we have sourced is a 4m collinear, with a gain quoted by the manufacturer of 12dBi. The signal pattern for the antenna shows a very good all over island coverage, and signals should be wall to wall (good enough to blow some peoples windows out!) on both the west coast of UK, south of Scotland and the east coast of Ireland. It is uncertain as to how coverage will extend towards Wales as it was very misty the last time we ventured up Snaefell and we couldn’t see as far as Anglesey.
The repeater is currently being receiving a rewiring upgrade of the repeater control logic to allow it to connect to the internet via Echolink and Allstar, again opening up more opportunity for people around the world to log in and use 4m. It is hoped that cross band will be achieved with GB3IM and GB3GD to further enhance the possibilities for multiple communication paths, and enable repeater pileups.
The group hope that the repeater will be as popular as GB3GD is on 2m, and that amateurs worldwide take the opportunity to work those rare GD calls through the new internet linked system.
